This winter season students from the EJTA journalism schools will work together in cross-national teams on fact checks and blogs. A variety of European topics will be addressed: polarisation, climate change, migration, defence budgets and more. Follow us here or on our Twitter and 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.
“A recent job market study shows that about five percent of male Chechen immigrants living in Austria since 2016 have a job” states unzensuriert.at. As claim source the article mentions a study conducted by the Public Employment Service Austria (AMS) – this is false. Moreover, the authors of the actual study do not fully confirm…
Thomas Haldenwang, president of the German intelligence service “Verfassungsschutz”, claimed that “the Internet channel RT Deutsch and the news agency Sputnik advertised so-called Hygienedemos and exaggerated them afterwards“. Our research doesn’t prove Haldenwang right but it’s possible that the Verfassungsschutz uses different sources which is why we assess the claim as uncheckable. The Federal Office…
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that the anti-Covid drug will begin to be distributed in just over a month: “If the final stages of preparation of the Oxford-Irbm Pomezia-AstraZeneca vaccine will be completed in the coming weeks, the first doses will be available in early December. The statement, taken from the book “Why Italy…
Information that Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo announced a curfew was published at the Russian Internet portal “Izvestia” on October 16, 2020. The news portal says that since October 19 a curfew starts from midnight to 5 am for a month period, Christmas markets will be canceled, cafes and restaurants will be closed.
Referring to the European Central Bank (ECB) the german „Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“ (FAZ) headlined on September 24th, 2020: “In the crisis, people are hoarding cash.“ Even if the term “hoarding” is incorrect in this case, all other figures, facts, quotations and the context are correct, which is why the claim is to be assessed as…
Donald Trump’s Twitter posting on 9 July 2020 establishes a correlation between the corona tests performed in a country and the confirmed Covid-19 cases in that country. Explicitly, he claims for the USA: “For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as…
In a headline on April 5, 2020, the Copenhagen Post, an English-language publication in Denmark, wrote that “Twice as many men dead from coronavirus as women.” In the article itself, the publication sources the claim from a report released by Statens Serum Institut, an official institution operated under the Danish Ministry of Health that aims…
On March 26th, Jon Stone, a policy correspondent at The Independent UK wrote a series of tweets in which he claimed that select normal EU unemployment benefits are similar to what the UK is doing for those who cannot work due to the COVID-19 crisis. “One thing I think many British people may not understand…
According to an article published in the online version of Croatian daily newspaper ‘Večernji list’, titled “List of the most tolerant countries in the world has been published. Where is Croatia?”, the country is very highly ranked. However, the study quoted in the article uses the world “inclusiveness” and does not mention “tolerance” anywhere. Therefore,…
Dutch politicians are regularly seen in late night talk shows, especially during the corona crisis. In the Dutch talk show ‘Op1’ party leader Rob Jetten from the social-liberal party D66 took part in a discussion and tried to explain how important the proposed Merkel-Macron Corona virus relief agreement is for the EU and the Netherlands.…
On 31/1/2019 an article published on more than 25 websites (some of those referred to another website as a source) stated that the European Parliament conducted a National Public Opinion that “records interesting trends of the electorate, considering the elections taking place in May”. In the articles is stated that the European Parliament conducted a…
The first report for the EU Fact Check focused on a widely disseminated news item, was extensively disseminated in news websites, referring in a report published by the European Parliament regarding the voting intentions of the Greek citizens. he European Parliament report was misinterpreted without taking account of the report’s findings and the use of…
As Belgians, the past few weeks we have experienced weekly youth demonstrations for a better climate policy. Since the youth demonstrations of May ’68, which changed the political landscape at that time, we haven’t had such relentless passion for change. There is no doubt that climate change is one of the hottest topics right now.
For such a big project as our EUfactcheck, we have to get every lecturer ready. To do so we organised a bootcamp on 24-25 January. Lecturers from twenty different Journalism schools visited the Institute of Media at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Hello! I’m Pauline. I’m a plastic particle living in a sanitary pad. I hear a lot of things said about me, so I decided to find out more for myself by meeting and questioning actors in the world of plastic that could enlighten me about my life and my fate. I’ve been wondering about four…
To get behind the scenes of our article on food traceability in the European Union, we have produced a Timeline. We return to the different important steps that constituted our reasoning. Choice of subject, validation, writing, publication, etc. The realization of the pitfalls of this fact-checking mobilized many of our resources. We have scoured the…
“The way Facebook works is simple: the more money you spend, the wider your audience. For 10 euros, the post reaches 30,000 people, and for 100 euros, it reaches 300,000. The candidate with the deepest pockets has all the odds in their favor.” José Bové, Green MEP, December 14, Libération Our students tried in many…
From December 11 to 20, our group focused on the issue of immigration. Among the topics we identified, the subject of “the cost of immigration” appeared fairly clearly. Particularly due to the significant number of comments found on social networks, especially Twitter. 1) Our Selection We identified a video released by Damien Rieu on December…
The new European-wide campaign Y Vote is working hard to encourage young people to make informed choices at the upcoming European Parliament elections.
Dutch locals from the city of Utrecht assembled to express their support to Jewish Utrecht residents at the Nova shopping centre in the district Kanaleneiland on 13 January. With kippahs on their heads, the protest participants spoke out about intolerance, anti-Semitism and remembered the social democratic values which Europe has at its core.
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
