PolitiFact

Politifact is an American journalistic research and verification project in the field of US politics: reporters and authors subject statements by members of the US Congress, the White House and lobby groups to a "fact check". The newsroom is run by the Florida newspaper Tampa Bay Times and its affiliated media.

Politifact publishes the original statement and compares it with researched facts. The statements are evaluated with a "Truth-O-Meter". The rating ranges from "truth" for completely accurate statements to "Pants on Fire" (based on the children's saying "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for completely false statements (see also "Fake News").

The portal was started in 2007 by the then Washington bureau chief of the Tampa Bay Times, Bill Adair. The editors wrote themselves a computer program with which statements could be quickly checked by means of a database query. During the candidates' campaigns, 750 political statements were checked for their truthfulness in the 2008 US presidential election campaign.

During Barack Obama's presidency, an "Obama-O-Meter" was used to document the number of campaign promises he kept. Since Donald Trump's presidency, the portal has received even greater attention beyond the US: detailed fact checks of statements made by members of the Trump administration and Trump himself are carried out on a daily basis. For example, presidential spokesman Sean Spicer's "claim" that the presidential inauguration on January 21, 2017 was the biggest US inauguration ever was investigated and rated "Pants on Fire", meaning "completely untrue".

Both major political camps in the USA (Republicans/Democrats) see from time to time a certain imbalance or a distortion ("bias") of examined points in the respective other direction. One of the most relevant points of criticism is that PolitiFact uses its fact check to examine certain statements that cannot really be subjected to this method correctly.

Politifact was criticized in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic for calling the possibility that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan a "disproven conspiracy theory" in its "fact check." In fact, however, many scientists support this thesis and the debate around it increased in the period that followed, forcing Politifact to retract its assessment months later.

Lie of the year

Every year since 2009, PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year from the US political establishment. For example, Donald Trump's oft-repeated claim that Russia had no influence on the 2016 presidential campaign became the 2017 Lie of the Year.

Awards (selection)

• 2009: Pulitzer Prize in the field of "National Journalism" (for coverage of the 2008 US presidential election campaign)