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Susan Benkelman joined the American Press Institute in November to lead its project to improve and expand accountability journalism. Before joining API, Susan worked for five years as a news editor in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Previously she was the editorial director at CQ-Roll Call, holding the top newsroom job at the company formed by the merger of Roll Call and Congressional Quarterly, where she spent 15 years as an editor. Previously, Susan was been a reporter at Newsday in Washington, New York and Moscow, and before that was in the Washington and Lansing bureaus for the Detroit News. Originally from Michigan, she holds a degree in Journalism from Michigan State University.
So long, fact-checkers Friday is Alexios Mantzarlis’ last day as IFCN Director, so we’ll let him have the top of the newsletter this week. (He also got cake.) Alexios will be succeeded by Baybars Örsek, formerly the director of Turkish fact-checking site Doğruluk Payı. Cristina Tardáguila, the director of Brazilian fact-checking wire Agência Lupa, will also be […]
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Fact-checking the State of the Union The State of the Union represents, as CNN’s Brian Stelter called it, the Super Bowl of fact-checking. And like this year’s football game, there was a lot of interest for an event that may or may not have lived up to its hype, depending on your perspective. After watching the […]
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Politicians are great amplifiers A lot of effort is put toward detecting misinformation at its source. Whether it’s 4chan, a subreddit or a WhatsApp group, knowing the origin of a hoax can help explain its appeal. But as Data & Society’s Whitney Phillips has repeatedly noted, the channels of amplification matter. Media mechanisms can be gamed into […]
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Fact-checkers in the past year have come to resemble emergency physicians doing triage in a raging epidemic. The amount of work is overwhelming, but they feel more essential than ever. Volume is not their only challenge. At both national and local levels, the journalists who attempt to hold politicians accountable for telling the truth are […]
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Think it’s too early to focus on the 2020 presidential campaign? The trolls apparently don’t. For all we learned about misinformation in 2016, it’s already clear journalists and the public will need to be on guard early for bad actors spreading falsehoods about the candidates in the next campaign cycle. They work fast, too. U.S. […]
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One out of every three stories that readers submit to Maldito Bulo for fact-checking is related to immigration. That’s why Maldita.es, the digital media outlet that houses Spanish fact-checking site Maldito Bulo, launched on Tuesday a parallel project called Maldita Migración. The minisite is dedicated to uncovering data and fact-checking hoaxes about migration. The new […]
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United States Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview Sunday with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes” was notable for a number of reasons. For one, not many first-year members of Congress get that kind of platform. But one comment in particular touched a nerve for the fact-checking community. When Ocasio-Cortez was asked about a Washington Post fact check awarding her four […]
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