Planet Princeton Announces New Feature Called Princeton Fact Check

Planet Princeton is excited to announce a new feature — Princeton Fact Check.

Public officials who make factual claims are accountable for their words and should be able to provide evidence to back them up. We will feature posts on our local news website that rate the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others in local, county, and state politics.

We will research statements  and claims made by elected officials, candidates, leaders of political parties, political activists, public employees, and advocacy groups and and rate their accuracy. We will also, from time to time, analyze claims from pundits, columnists, bloggers, political analysts, talk show hosts, and other members of the media.

Speeches, news stories, press releases, campaign brochures, TV ads, Facebook postings and transcripts of interviews are fair game. We will select the most newsworthy and significant statements to check.

We don’t check opinions, and will look at statements that are rooted in facts that are verifiable, particularly statements that leave a particular impression that may be misleading, significant statements, and statement likely to be passed on and repeated by others.

The goal of Princeton Fact Check is to reflect the relative accuracy of a statement. We will reference our sources when we present our findings. We will rank statements as true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, and ridiculous (for statements that are not accurate and make a ridiculous claim).

Readers who would like to submit statements or claims to fact check, or who see an error in any of our Princeton Fact Check posts, should contact Planet Princeton at editor@planetprinceton.com.

This new feature is being added to Planet Princeton based on feedback from a survey of our email subscribers. Thank you to the more than 300 people who participated in that survey.

 

 

Avatar of Krystal Knapp

Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.

2 Comments

  1. Without getting overly philosophical, you may find the line between fact and opinion blurry at times.

    Good luck though.

  2. Yet, you still decided on a April fool’s joke that makes light of the ground where US soldiers and Marines died. Move on over Woodward and Bernstein, Planet Princeton is bringing in the real news.

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