News Outlets Doing More Fact-Checking Of Political Ads

By: Joe Strupp News outlets are fact-checking political advertising more than ever, according to two new studies being released Friday morning, which indicate the number of newspaper "adwatch" stories has more than tripled since the beginning of the decade.

?Those who feed false or misleading information to voters are going to be under more scrutiny in 2008,? said FactCheck.org director Brooks Jackson. ?For political advertisers the message is ?Caveat mendax ? let the liar beware.??

Newspaper and broadcast journalists are becoming more aggressive in challenging false or misleading political claims, according to the studies released today by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

The studies are being released by FactCheck.org and the Annenberg center at a Washington, D.C., conference titled, ?Pants on Fire, Political Mendacity and the Rise of Media Fact-Checkers.?

Among the findings:

? A study of stories published in 34 of the largest U.S. newspapers showed the number of ?adwatch? type stories published in the 2005/2006 election cycle was more than 3-1/2 times higher than the number in the 1999/2000 election cycle.

? A second survey of all U.S. televisions stations with original news programming revealed 38.8% of respondents ran ?adwatch? or ?fact-check? stories in the 2006 election cycle, with 45.6% planning to run such stories during the 2008 campaign.

"The studies document that the recent launching of fact-checking features by The Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times/Congressional Quarterly are only the most recent developments in a trend that has been gathering momentum since the 2000 presidential campaign, when the number of newspaper adwatch stories hit its lowest ebb," the release on the studies added.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said, "The press is increasingly fulfilling its duty as custodian of truth.?

Online copies of the two reports are available here .