But you can’t do a he-said, she-said type story. They still have to go out and gather data and they do research and interviews. How does reporting for PolitiFact Ohio compare to reporting a regular story?įor reporters it is very much the same kind of process. An edited transcript of our conversation appears here. Higgs and I discussed how the operation works, who reads the posts, and how, if at all, the fact-checking project has influenced regular news coverage and the candidates themselves. Occasionally, the state’s other newspapers pick up PolitiFact Ohio stories, too. Like its parent, the Tampa Bay Times’s, the Ohio project’s website features a “Truth-O-Meter” to rate the statements of public figures and delivers ratings ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” Stories also run in the print edition and appear on, the main site for The Plain Dealer, and are featured on PolitiFact Ohio’s Facebook page and Twitter feed. Only one reporter, Tom Feran, has been assigned to write for the site full time, but other regular contributors include the PD’s political reporter, Henry Gomez, along with reporters in Cleveland and the Washington and Columbus Statehouse bureaus. Prior to Higgs’s full-time work with PolitiFact, he was the newspaper’s online medical editor and was also a deputy metro editor. I spoke recently with Robert Higgs, the editor of PolitiFact Ohio, which was launched in July 2010. Given that background, it seemed a good moment to get a peek behind the curtain of Ohio’s franchise of PolitiFact, which is published by The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. Internet to Times: Are you freaking kidding?īoth Graves and Felix Salmon, here at CJR, picked up on another thread-the way that fact-checking, even as it has exploded, has evolved into a “specialized form of journalism relegated to the sidebar or a separate site.” And they pondered whether it will, or could be, absorbed into everyday political coverage. Writing at Nieman Lab, Lucas Graves offered the best summary of the feedback: Times to Internet: Should we fact-check the things politicians’ say? Brisbane asked readers if reporters should “challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” The Times shut down the comments section after the column received 265 responses in three hours. Consider the acerbic reaction that erupted after New York Times public editor Arthur S. The role of fact-checking, after all, is at the center of current discourse about journalism. (It seemed even more apt when I made a surprising discovery about Friday’s line, which I’ll clarify below.) At the risk of exposing my, er, maturity, I thought that phrase, famously attributed to Detective Joe Friday of the old Dragnet television series, was the perfect opening for this post on our state’s dedicated fact-checking site, PolitiFact Ohio.
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