That’s the idea behind our Ask FactCheck feature on the main site.
This week, we looked into a suspicious quote allegedly from President-elect Barack Obama, speaking about urgent gun policy changes. The reader who sent it to us wasn’t convinced it was legitimate, and our reporting showed it was almost certainly a fabrication. The quote claims [...]
Yesterday we posted something about the evolution of rumors. Here’s a postscript: Sometimes in addition to developing new eyespots or camouflage, they actually engage in a little adaptive development — rumors that aren’t working mutate into slightly altered versions that haven’t been debunked yet.
A case in point: First there was the canard that Obama didn’t [...]
One thing we’ve noticed at FactCheck is that e-mail rumors tend to circulate, get debunked (ideally), go dormant for a while, and then flare up again. Think of it as a horde of zombies — they come at you, you kill them, you breathe a sigh of relief, and then there’s an extreme closeup and [...]
Enthusiastic truth-seekers (and angry partisans) have been inundating us with questions this election cycle. We’re thrilled to be your go-to guys, but sometimes the rumors take a long time to untangle — the truth is rarely straightforward enough to fit neatly into an ad, a sound bite or a chain e-mail. As the election nears, though, [...]
We have updated our Ask FactCheck item on John McCain’s flying career to note new information uncovered by the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper found records of a Navy investigation into the crash of John McCain’s aircraft while he was in flight training in 1960. McCain and others have written that the plane went down [...]