Catharine Richert’s boss once told her that she had the hardest job in the newsroom.
As the sole reporter working on Poligraph, Minnesota Public Radio’s fact-checking feature, Richert investigates claims made by state politicians and rates them Accurate, Misleading, Inconclusive or False. She publishes her fact-checks on the MPR website and discusses her fact-checks on the air Friday afternoons.
Five years after Richert started it, Poligraph has become a well-known part of MPR’s political coverage. Although refereeing Minnesota’s often sharp-elbowed politics is no easy task, Richert has managed to make Poligraph a success.
“MPR has been able to build a very specific brand around what we do that’s very recognizable to our audience,” she said.
Despite the limitations of running a one-woman show, Richert believes that being the single voice gives her credibility and consistency on the radio.
Catharine Richert
“I think with radio that one single voice reporting on something is all that much more important.”
Poligraph began as a joint initiative between MPR and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in 2010. Richert, a grad student at the Humphrey School at the time, worked for Poligraph part-time while in school. Her previous experience working for PolitiFact in Washington, D.C. helped prepare her for the job. When she graduated in May 2011, MPR offered her a full-time position.
MPR’s affiliation with the Humphrey school ended, but Richert kept the feature going.
To determine which claims to check each week, Richert discusses possibilities with her editor. Their most important criteria is that the claim was in the news that week.
“Other than that, we fact-check things that make us curious,” she said. “Most weeks, we try to check one Republican and one Democrat, and we’re pretty strict about that.”
Although the three other reporters on the MPR politics team keep their eyes open for ideas, Richert and her editor are the primary contributors.
They began with three ratings — Accurate, False and Inconclusive — and added Misleading.
She said that Poligraph also started incorporating their sourcing directly into the story, instead of listing it at the end, and fine-tuned her radio appearances.
“I think we’ve gotten a lot better about being clear and concise on the air and just hitting the top things people need to know,” she said.
Richert said that fact-checking in Minnesota is different than at the national level because she can have more impact.
“Occasionally, people will just stop using a talking point after we do what we do,” she said. “It happens a little more often here than it did when I was working in Washington.”
She has found that politicians in Minnesota are more responsive to fact-checkers than the politicians she dealt with in Washington while working for PolitiFact.
“People here are far more willing to be transparent about where they’re getting their information,” she said. “It’s rare when someone doesn’t respond to an email.”
Richert noted that Minnesotans are especially engaged in politics and want to hold their politicians accountable.
“People are really interested in policies,” she said. “They want to know the details behind some of the things that people say.”
Richert said that most of the reaction to Poligraph has been positive and that people enjoy the feature on the radio.
“I certainly get my share of angry emails,” she said, “but I think that at the end of the day, people appreciate being more well-versed in what the facts are whether they agree with them or not.”
Richert said the success of Poligraph shows that it doesn’t take a giant staff to hold politicians accountable.
“You don’t have to have this elaborate set-up to fact-check,” she said. “You can simply do it through reporting — and that’s what all reporters should be doing.”
The capital of Iran’s fact-checking movement is not in Tehran, but Toronto.
When Farhad Souzanchi wanted to promote government accountability in his home country of Iran and track the campaign promises of President Hassan Rouhani, his only choice was to open an office in Canada, more than 6,000 miles away. For the last 18 months, the Rouhani Meter — a unique fact-checking website because it is run remotely from another country — has broken new ground in fact-checking journalism.
Since Hassan Rouhani was sworn in as Iran’s seventh president Aug. 3, 2013, Souzanchi and has team have been tracking and updating a list of promises made during Rouhani’s campaign and the first 100 days of presidency. The project, a collaborative effort between ASL19, a research organization that helps Iranians circumvent Iran’s internet censorship, and the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has researched 73 promises and rated them as Achieved, In Progress, Not Achieved or Inactive.
“When Rouhani came, he campaigned on hope and presented himself as a moderate. He said he would fix the image of Iran on the international stage, and with that came a lot of exciting promises,” Souzanchi said. “Our main goal was to promote conversation over these issues — government accountability and government transparency.”
There is virtually no transparency in Iran, which ranks 173rd out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2014 World Press Freedom Index. The Rouhani Meter is currently the only active fact-checking project in the entire Middle East.
In a world with a 24-hour news cycle and a growing global fact-checking movement, politicians in countries with a free press are growing accustomed to having their words scrutinized. In the United States, White House aides and members of Congress often cite fact-checking websites. But you won’t find Iranian officials citing the Rouhani Meter—they won’t even acknowledge the site’s existence.
“President Rouhani once said that people are monitoring us through the Internet. It was an indirect mention of it,” Souzanchi said. “But they haven’t addressed Rouhani Meter directly. They don’t want to legitimize it.”
To date, the Rouhani Meter has followed 73 promises made be Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during his campaign and first 100 days in office.
Working from across the Atlantic Ocean, access to reliable information is the biggest challenge the Rouhani Meter staff faces in its day-to-day reporting. Iran’s government maintains tight control over public information. ASL19 policies dictate that their reporting cannot involve collaboration with sources inside Iran, which would pose a risk to the sources’ safety.
The Rouhani Meter is forced to follow the Iranian press and collaborate with journalists working outside the country to check the president’s promises, a tactic that has impressed researchers who study the global fact-checking movement.
“It’s hard to imagine how you go about that without having access to data from the government or groups within the country,” said Lucas Graves, assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “With how complicated and nuanced these questions very often get, even a seemingly-straight-forward fact-check sometimes takes several days to research. Having seen these processes up close, I can’t imagine the difficulties of having to do this from halfway around the world.”
Without an error to date, the site’s painstakingly meticulous process has paid dividends.
Of the 73 registered promises on the Rouhani Meter, 11 percent are considered “Achieved” and 36 percent are designated “In Progress.” Five percent of promises are labeled “Not Achieved,” with the remaining 48 percent inactive. Promises on the site are broken down into four categories—socio-cultural, domestic policy, economy and foreign policy, which were the pillars of Rouhani’s campaign.
A sample of some of the socio-cultural promises the Rouhani Meter is currently tracking.
Some promises are easy to check. For example, Rouhani’s promise to re-open Iran’s House of Cinema was easily verified when the theater was opened Sept. 12 by deputy culture minister Hojjatollah Ayoubi. Rouhani’s plan to establish a Ministry of Women is yet to come to fruition, so the promise is designated as “Not Achieved.” Other promises are much more difficult to track, particularly those involving the economy. With little economic data available (and healthy doses of skepticism about that data’s validity), tracking Rouhani’s pledge to increase Iran’s economic growth poses a major challenge. The promise is currently designated by the Rouhani Meter as “In Progress.”
Since its launch on the day of Rouhani’s inauguration, the site has been visited more than 20 million times by 3.6 million unique visitors across the world. The Rouhani Meter is available in English, but the site’s Farsi version makes up more than 95 percent of its traffic. Reports on the site are often written in Farsi before being translated to English, but Souzanchi said that process varies.
Viewing the site from inside Iran presents a challenge all its own. A month after the site launched, it was blocked by the Iranian government. It can still be accessed with Internet circumvention tools and virtual private networks.
Souzanchi indicated that a lack of mainstream accessibility does not affect readership. Internet circumvention is a way of life in the tech-savvy nation of Iran, where nearly three-fourths of the country’s population is under the age of 40.
Iranians are accustomed to using circumvention tools so they can access popular websites Facebook and Twitter, so they can easily use them to see the Rouhani Meter.
“It hasn’t been a problem reaching people,” Souzanchi said.
Despite the Rouhani Meter’s goal to give Iranian citizens access to information, the project has some opponents inside the country’s borders. Much of this is because Souzanchi was inspired to start the site after seeing the Morsi Meter in Egypt, which tracked promises made by President Mohamed Morsi until he was overthrown in a coup.
Because Morsi was ultimately overthrown, conservative Iranians have attacked the Rouhani Meter because they fear the website conspires to carry out similar plots in Iran—a claim that Souzanchi says is not true.
“My answer to those who accuse Rouhani Meter of overthrowing President Rouhani is that our project is not about that,” Souzanchi said. “It is about encouraging political accountability in government. We, and I believe all healthy promise tracking platforms, are focused on accurate reporting based on strong research. Our reports on promises, which may be sometimes positive or negative, are always backed by the best data we have access to.
“In order to be a reliable and transparent source of information, promise trackers cannot and will not side with or against political leadership. Meters and fact-checking websites are ultimately there to help citizens to make informed, evidence-based decisions in a democratic process—and if we did our job, encourage healthy discussion.”
As the site continues to grow, the Rouhani Meter team has launched the Majlis Monitor, a new website that tracks activities in the Iranian parliament. Souzanchi also is looking for ways to expand its coverage to Iranians around the world.
A more challenging long-term goal is the expansion from promise-checking into fact-checking, which Graves said would be an even tougher task for an organization that works remotely. But the organization that refuses to let an ocean, opaque government activities and censored internet access stand in their way thinks it is up to the challenge.
“Through close collaborations with experts, activists, Iran-focused institutions and of course crowdsourcing hopefully we can overcome the challenges of limited access to information as much as possible,” Souzanchi said. “As ASL19’s motto goes, ‘There is always a way!’”
Update, March 17: We clarified our description of the unusual remote approach of the Rouhani Meter to say that it is “a unique fact-checking website because it is run remotely from another country.” As far as we know, it is the only one run entirely from another country, but there are some sites in which fact-checkers in one nation also fact-check claims from another nation.
Silverman has partnered with Fast Company magazine, which has collected the rumors in a single article. The partnership gives Silverman’s innovative work a larger audience and some business-mag cred.
Craig Silverman
Like other rumors Silverman and his team follow on Emergent, they have identified the mishmash of speculation and anonymously sourced tidbits about Apple and separated them into bite-sized claims that readers can follow as Apple makes its official announcements.
For example, some rumors about the pricing structure of the Watch have now been rated True, such as the report in AppleInsider that the stainless-steel model will cost $499-549. But others have been rated False, such as the report in TechCrunch that the gold version will cost $1,200. (Actual price: $10,000+)
Silverman’s Apple rumor tracking is a great example of structured journalism. It allows people interested in the company and its products to get the latest about what’s true, what’s not and what’s still just speculation. Because it’s structured, readers can see all the False, True or Unverified claims.
It’s also a great way to hold journalists accountable. Assuming the project continues, we’ll eventually be able to see whether, say, MacRumors has a better record of anonymous reports than Re/code.
As of March 10, one day after the announcement, Emergent had rated 28 of the rumors False and 22 True.
Julian Rademeyer, the editor of AfricaCheck, will be the first journalist to take part in the Visiting Fact-Checker Program of the Duke Reporters’ Lab when he visits the Sanford School of Public Policy in late March.
During his week-long visit, which is sponsored by the Duke Africa Initiative, Rademeyer will speak to students and faculty at two events:
The challenges of fact-checking and collecting data in Africa — A workshop on how journalists at Africa Check deal with the challenge of lack of transparency and limited data in many African countries. Finding accurate data is often a slow, frustrating and arduous process. But the fact-checkers can play a vital role in pointing out the weaknesses, campaigning for better data and pushing back against government bureaucracies that obfuscate and obstruct. Monday, March 30, Noon-1:15 p.m., Rubenstein 149
Ebola: Fact-checking myths that kill — In Liberia, villagers claimed that Ebola was “only a rumor” and a crowd, angered at the sudden quarantine of patients, stormed a clinic to release them, shouting, “There is no Ebola”. In Nigeria, a prominent professor of ophthalmology claimed that drinking a concoction made from a plant popularly known as ewedu can help prevent and even cure Ebola. Throughout the continent, fear about Ebola has sometimes outpaced the truth. Julian Rademeyer, the editor of the fact-checking site Africa Check, will discuss how the falsehoods have spread and how fact-checkers have worked to debunk them. Wednesday, April 1, 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m., Sanford 03.
Julian Rademeyer is the editor of Africa Check and the author of Killing for Profit.
Rademeyer is an award-winning journalist and the author of the best-selling book Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade. He heads AfricaCheck, which researches claims by politicians and the media in Africa and promotes fact-checking throughout the continent.
The Duke Africa Initiative brings together scholars with an interest in Africa and sponsors programs about the countries and cultures of the African continent.
Rademeyer will be the first to participate in the Visiting Fact-Checker Program of the Reporters’ Lab, a new effort to invite fact-checkers to Duke to share their experiences and meet with journalists in the United States.
