In a tweet from March 7, member of the European Parliament Gerolf Annemans (ECR) claimed that “Polarisation is democratic. Politically correct and dull ‘standardised thinking’ isn’t.” The concept ‘polarisation’ indicates moving towards ‘the extremes’ of a certain ideology and implies that there is no such thing as a political centre. We lined up the views…
Salaries of government officials are always under scrutiny. The payment of EU officials is no exception. ‘Top EU civil servants to pocket salaries over €20,000 a month for the first time’, reads a Telegraph headline from last December. ‘10,000 European Union officials better paid than David Cameron’, wrote the same paper back in 2014. ‘Over…
During our fact checking process, we’ve learned the meaning of perseverance, when we tried calling the politicians behind the statements checked for weeks with no response. We’ve had to develop stamina, as we stayed up all night writing and then had to make it to early meetings the next morning. And let’s not forget out…
Blog: Al-Jazeera insists that extremists and nationalists are preparing to purge the European Parliament in the upcoming elections
When we started our first-check, the idea was kind of strange to us, even though we are students journalism, the concept isn’t really integrated into our news cycle. When we went to look for examples, we found fact-checks about studies, political parties, news articles but not about real people or what they say. When…
By Tringa Hasaj Russia Today (RT) UK posted a video on Twitter on March 11th 2019 about a rising of right-wing parties in Europe. We believe the claim to be mostly true. The poll was first reported on by Bild on March 8th. The survey supposedly reveals that right-wing parties in Europe will double…
In our pursuit of an interesting topic for our first fact check analysis, we decided to watch the most popular weekly Croatian TV talk show Nedjeljom u 2. In one episode, the guest was Mislav Kolakušić, a prominent judge in Zagreb’s Commercial Court who has become popular for his strong views on politics and current…
What role did the media play in the run-up to the Dutch provincial and Senate elections of 20 March? These were won by the far-right populist Forum for Democracy and its leader Thierry Baudet. Shouldn’t the media have fact-checked, corrected and brought to attention the danger that the party and its leader present? This is…
A young Austrian politician and candidate for the EU parliament election recently stated that there were between „25.000 and 30.000 lobbyists“ working in Brussels“ spending around 1,15 billion Euros (yearly) in order to influence policies and laws. One would assume that numbers are easy to verify. We thought so as well. However, we got confronted…
On March the 4th, 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted “an appeal” to Europe.