Iffy.news releases 2024 PolitiFact-check
Iffy.news, former RJI Fellow Barrett Golding’s index of unreliable online news sources, has issued its latest “PolitiFact-check,” which rates the veracity of statements about politics from a wide variety of public figures, organizations and media sources.
During each election cycle since 2017, when the first version debuted on RJI, the PolitiFact-check has compiled data for those with multiple fact checks from PolitiFact — including comedians, actors, news outlets and (of course) politicians — and converted those checks to numerical scores, averaging the scores into a ranking of political commentators from most to least truthful.
As in years past, this year’s results crowned comedians as the most truthful, with print journalists landing in second place. In contrast, social media chatter ranked at the very bottom, below talk radio and political advocacy groups.
“PolitiFact are the kings of fact-check,” Golding said. “I’m very appreciative they let me convert their data into credibility scores. It’s helpful to know someone’s statement is false, but as helpful is to identify serial fabulists.”
In addition to rankings grouped by category, 150 individual “newsmakers” also received scores, with journalists across a variety of mediums landing all over the map. The New York Times’ David Brooks and CNN’s Jake Tapper topped the trustworthiness scale, while commentator Alex Jones and Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade earned scores well into the scale’s lowest ranking: “pants on fire.”
In total, this year’s edition incorporated data from more than 20,000 fact checks for more than 1,100 people and organizations.
About Barrett Golding
Golding’s 2015-2016 RJI Fellowship centered around developing open-source WordPress plugins to support journalists in a variety of tasks, such as fact checking and data visualization. Over the course of several decades in the news industry, he has produced audio journalism for NPR, served as a web developer and reported on misinformation and disinformation.
Cite this article
Fitzgerald, Austin (2024, Oct. 28). Iffy.news releases 2024 PolitiFact-check. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/iffy-news-releases-2024-politifact-check/
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