A surprising look at the AP “Fact Check”

Hoosier8 · Jan 23, 2018

A surprising look at the AP “Fact Check”

Evidently someone has fact check the fact checkers.

long-term project to preserve and strengthen our basic grasp of reality and facts — and our ability to distinguish facts from opinions and complex judgments. There are some serious epistemological issues that need to be sorted out if we’re going to have a civilization with reliable fact-checking. Also, political ideology and partisanship is looking like a huge threat to our shared grasp of reality, and we need a lot more — and more rigorous — social science research in this area.

For my first installment, I want to highlight the performance of AP Fact Check. On November 30, I went through the fact-checks on their homepage, one by one (they were in descending chronological order, so each one was further back in November). Here I’ll walk through the first seven fact-checks I encountered (I only include the full-fledged fact-check articles, which focused on one specific claim. I skipped the feature called NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week, which was an aggregation of quick hits.)

AP Fact Check is remarkable, and in fact unique among American fact-checkers, in several respects:

AP only examines things conservatives say (almost always Trump), with one exception sandwiched in an attack on conservatives. This holds true across all single-issue fact-check articles from November 1, 2017 through January, 18, 2018.

They always rule that the conservative’s statement is false.

They almost never provide any sources or links for their claims. Importantly, this violates Google’s policy for fact-checkers that it promotes at the top of search results, yet inexplicably Google still promotes AP.

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A surprising look at the AP “Fact Check”

Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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A surprising look at the AP “Fact Check”

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