This spring season students from the EJTA journalism schools will once again check statements about topics in the upcoming EU elections. In their home universities and in cooperation with students from other EJTA schools they will produce fact checks, analyses and blogs. We expect to publish the first posts in early April. Follow us here or on X and on our Facebook page.
EUfactcheck, an initiative of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) fights misinformation about European policies and topics. Journalism students from all over Europe factcheck claims made by politicians and others and rate them. Our focus is not to debunk fake news or disinformation but to give correct information to the reader.
According to an article published by Berliner Morgenpost on January 6, a study of the Essen University Hospital claims that up to 500 children required treatment in intensive care units in Germany after suicide attempts. Since it is not possible to verify this statement, this claim must be classified as uncheckable. The article explains that the lockdown…
In an article titled “Chinese graphite dominance threatens electric car ambitions”, posted on 14th March 2022, “Deutsche Welle” reports that Chinese graphite dominance threatens electric car ambitions worldwide. The author Ashutosh Pandey (Senior Business Editor for DW) states that China is a dominating force in the graphite supply chain, bearing in mind that the material…
German trend researcher Corinna Mühlhausen claims to have found out that “Generation Z suffers from psychological problems more than any other generation before it”. Even though the numbers of psychotherapies of children and adolescents are rising rapidly right now, it is not possible to verify this fact clearly. Therefore this claim must be classified as…
On January 15 2022, the chairman of the far-left party PVDA Raoul Hedebouw joined Conner Rousseau, chairman of left-wing party Vooruit, in an interview with De Morgen to discuss the possibility of releasing the Covid-vaccine patents. During this interview Hedebouw claimed that “of all European countries, Belgium blocks the waiver to release Covid-vaccine patents for…
On the 2nd of December 2021 Croatian president Zoran Milanović made a claim when he spoke to the press on the Croatian island of Vis in which he referred to the massacre in Srebrenica, also known as the Srebrenica genocide: „Srebrenica is not the same as the Holocaust, it is not the same as Jasenovac.…
Deloitte Belgium, the Belgian subsidiary of the global corporate services conglomerate, claimed in its yearly press release of 2020 that the company was able to reduce its carbon emissions by a third over the last three years. This claim turns out to be uncheckable. Deloitte is globally settled in over 150 countries with Deloitte Central…
With less than 40% of the population having been administered two doses, Moldova lags behind EU countries in the area of vaccination against covid19; an important concern for its national law-making authorities. After loosing its parliamentary majority in July 2021, the Moldovan Socialist Party claimed that the new government’s measures led to a near 60%…
On September 1, 2021, “Deutsche Welle” published an article titled “How much do school teachers earn in Germany and can they be granted gifts?” Its author, Xenia Safronova, a journalist, claims that German teachers are paid 3 to 5 thousand euro per month on average, and this meets the benchmark of «higher than average» in…
On November 20, 2020, a video appeared on the Georgian TikTok and Facebook, claiming that Italians had stormed a mall and, in this way, protested the demand for green passports. One of the sources of the video is a Georgian user, who published the video with hashtags #nocovidfascism #nogreenpassports #nocovidpassports #nodiscriminationagainstnon-vaccinated #nocovidterror #nogreenpass. A video posted…
On August 15th 2021, the German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed on Facebook that postal voting in Germany is “not a solution, but a problem” and that every election year has significant cases of electoral fraud. In the German federal election 2021, AfD member Björn Höcke called the people to go to…
On 15 June the borders of the Member States of the European Union and those belonging to the Schengen area and the United Kingdom will reopen. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio called it the “D-Day of European Tourism”.
Since the coronavirus outbreak, there has been an ongoing conversation within the media worldwide about weather and its potential impact on the virus. Weather is a complex topic, as there are a lot of aspects to be considered. Elements such as temperature, humidity, latitude, people staying inside more when it is cold, vitamins due to…
The coronavirus made big changes to lives all across the world. Travel plans and events have been cancelled, exams have to be made at home and we haven’t visited friends and family for weeks now. We discovered that the coronavirus also caused some problems in the factchecking process. 1 Contacting companies The first difficulty we…
Despite the good intensions of change, Coronavirus seems to highlight the limits of our society. We are in a moment of exceptional crisis, which is often compared to the one of 2008, however as the Covid-19 is an unknown and new disease, its economic and social impact is equally new. If we consider trends in…
Writers Julia Harder and Gwen Rochat, Journalism students at Windesheim University Zwolle, The Netherlands, noticed a tweet from the Icelandic Prime Minister, saying Iceland is the frontrunner in gender equality. In making this factcheck, we realized there is no yes/no answer to our question: the situation is far more complex. For example, we expected that…
In times of Corona, making the right decisions is not easy. Different experts come up with quotes and points of view about this pandemic. However, some of them are dangerously hard below the belt. I am mainly talking about the statement “After the plague, Corona is now entering Europe through Italy”. Not only is this…
Coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied with a dissemination of fake news and conspiracy theories. Georgia was no exception, as various groups, including pro-Kremlin, ultra-national, and radical groups have been referring to COVID-19 as an artificially created virus, spreading fear, and associating the virus with the 5G Internet. One of the authors of the disinformation and…
During the first weeks of the pandemic, headlines were about people hoarding toilet paper and long-lasting goods such as pasta and dry yeast. The concern about agriculture and gardening industries started to gain headlines as the pandemic continued to spread We analysed media coverage of agricultural themes from March 19 until the end of April.
On February 2, 2020 new regulations on obtaining a visa to Schengen Area countries came into force. Considering the proposed changes we can assume that these innovation are supposed to simplify receiving a Schengen visa. That simplification is the most apparent for those, who visit the Schengen Area countries on a regular basis.
During this lockdown we started “media monitoring” of sports websites. This implies that we’ve been scanning different sports websites during Corona times to find out how they approach news reporting right now and if we could find any similarities or differences between them. During this period we decided to focus on three different sports websites,…
EUFACTCHECK is the fact-checking project of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) that intends to build a sustainable curriculum unit on fact-checking within a European network of Journalism schools.
Through fact-checking European political claims and trying to tackle misinformation, we want our students and our public to grow a deeper insight and interest in democratic processes, both on national and European level.
EUFACTCHECK wishes to motivate fact-based debate in the EU and to stimulate media and information literacy.
After the success of the students’ publications, the participants of EJTA’s fact-checking project EUFACTCHECK decided at the EJTA AGM in Paris (July 2019) to move on with the project and to take new steps in the academic year 2019-2020.
By January-February 2019 a manual with guidelines and tips & tricks was published. In February 2020 a second Bootcamp will be organised in Ljubljana, with financial help from the Evens Foundation. This Train the Trainer focused on Central Eastern European countries, some new schools joined this project.
During corona the EJTA-schools continued to verify claims and publish fact checks. Now we are looking ahead to the 2024 EU elections.
For information about the EUfactcheck project please contact the programme manager: carien.touwen@hu.nl
