A fact-checking rodeo

Pants were on fire when PolitiFact covered Alabama's Senate race

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PolitiFact's foray into Alabama coincided with the U.S. Senate race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones that turned out to be "more exciting to cover than we ever could have expected," in the words of Executive Director Aaron Sharockman.

Attacks flew in advertising, political rallies and talk shows. PolitiFact has compiled a list of 28 stories, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/elections/2017/alabama-senate, most of which received varying degrees of false ratings, including eight "Pants on Fire."

In reality:

  • A woman who said Moore engaged in sexual misconduct with her when she was a teenager did not tamper with Moore's signature in her yearbook. Details
  • A Washington Post reporter did not have a "criminal history of faking," rather, the reporter had some speeding tickets and bounced a check for less than $7 as a college student. Details
  • NFL players who took a knee during the National Anthem were not "breaking the law" because there is no law against it. Details
  • Moore did not advocate doing away with Medicare and Medicaid. Details
  • And so on.

"Quite frankly, in many ways we really kind of lucked out, I suppose, in the amount of claims and obviously the national attention that came to the state based on the way the race actually played out," Sharockman said.

Before things got crazy in Alabama, PolitiFact had received a Knight Foundation grant for what Sharockman calls an experiment in improving news media credibility by reaching out to news consumers in three of the most conservative areas in the country and providing local and statewide fact-checking.

PolitiFact is working through May with Alabama Media Group and AL.com in Mobile, the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia. Sharockman said PolitiFact staffers do the actual fact-checking and writing while the local news organizations provide ideas, background and potential sources.

The organization expected a lively Senate primary between the "Ten Commandments judge" who was ousted twice from the U.S. Supreme Court and the appointed Republican candidate who had credibility issues of his own. But the general election, which ended with Doug Jones becoming the first Democrat in 25 years to win a U.S. Senate seat, made the fact-checkers even busier, not only with claims made by candidates and their supporters but by some members of the conservative media.

Nor did the false allegations stop when the polls closed. "Right after the election there was a massive proliferation of claims trying to suggest that the election was rigged, that pollworkers had been arrested, that vans were bussing people around to polling places to cast ballots for Doug Jones, presumably," Sharockman said. The Alabama secretary of state helped PolitiFact "beat back the rumors," he said.

The effectiveness of PolitiFact's initiative remains undetermined. "I think people were certainly interested in this information," Sharockman said. "If you liked Judge Moore and we said something he said was false, you're more likely to be upset or angry with us. If you supported Senator Jones and he said something that was false, you would again be angry with us."

Whether more people trust PolitiFact in the wake of the election is unclear. "I think we still have more work to do there. In this period now we'll see what we can do. I was very encouraged by not only the readership we got on PolitiFact but also the readership on AL.com, suggesting that people were very interested in the content we were providing. But again, because of the election dynamic, it created this more kind of polarizing grouping."

The other two states offer different political dynamics, Sharockman said. In West Virginia, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, faces a handful of Republicans; the primary is in May.

"You have Republicans attacking Republicans. You have Republicans attacking Joe Manchin; you have Joe Manchin fighting back ­­– a lot of good things for us to look at."

Oklahoma has proven to be challenging in a different way, Sharockman said. Lacking a controversial election, PolitiFact is fact-checking topics such as health care and tax policy while trying to identify what people want addressed. Also, because Tulsa has more than 400,000 residents while Charleston has 45,000, it's been easier to reach a larger percentage of the population in a smaller city, he said.

Sharockman said that at the end of the experiment he hopes to find a journalism foundation nationally or a local community or statewide foundation to help pay for a fulltime PolitiFact reporter to continue focusing on the three cities and states.

"We're learning a lot," he said. "We have a lot more yet to learn."


Jane Nicholes

Jane Nicholes is a freelance writer and editor based in Daphne, Ala. Reach her at jbnicholes@att.net.

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