Civic Discourse & Democracy

Introduction Media fact-checking has become a fact of life for political professionals, especially at the national level and in places where local news organizations have [...]

  Members of Congress cited national media fact-checks 80 times in floor speeches and debates from 2013 to 2014 — and Republicans referred to fact-checkers [...]

Most newsrooms’ early efforts to referee political communication focused on the content of political advertising. During election seasons, just trying to keep up with those [...]

Of the various ways to respond to critical fact checks, perhaps the easiest is to simply modify or even drop a faulty message. But the [...]

Politicians talk about fact-checking — a lot. But “you don’t have to take my word for it,” as Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington once [...]

Even before PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson contacted a congressional press secretary back in 2010, the spokesman’s boss had accumulated a disappointing series of low scores on [...]

False information on Twitter overpowers efforts to correct it by a ratio of about 3 to 1, according to a study published today by the [...]

The amount of fact-checking journalism produced in the United States is increasing dramatically, and while there are limits to its persuasiveness, it is a measurably [...]

To help understand the spread of rumors, look at them as if they’re viruses. Rumors “are nothing more than long strands of information seeking to [...]

Iowa has long been an epicenter for U.S. politics, as home to the first-in-the nation presidential caucuses. This year, with the caucuses and the 2016 presidential [...]