In light of the war in Ukraine the students from the EJTA journalism schools will focus more on background publications and less on factchecks, this seventh season of EUfactcheck. It is very difficult to fact-check war claims when primary sources are hard to find or impossible to reach. Our ‘Uncheckable claims’ show just how complicated it is to unravel the truth. So we will instead show you the context of fact-checking: in our blogs, interviews and media analyses.
The invasion of Ukraine has made it impossible for EJTA and EUfactcheck to further continue our cooperation with Russian journalism schools.
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.…
Javier Ortega-Smith, the Secretary-General of the Spanish far-right-wing party, Vox called gender violence a ‘big lie’ after the celebration of the new judicial year in the Community of Madrid, in September 9th of 2019. There was a significant emphasis on gender violence in that celebration and this made him state that ‘violence is violence and …
Domestic violence cases have jumped by 30 per cent during lockdown in France. Being confined at home with abusive partners increases the risk to victims. A TV report on Channel One Russia, covering the situation in France, included the claim that using code word “mask-19” is a common practice among French women to let people…
In a column published by The Guardian, former universities minister Chris Skidmore makes the claim that there’s a higher risk for poorer students dropping out if universities shift online. This article—based on a study from 2017—was posted 4 May, 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis forcing many universities to close and offer fully…
Monika Schnitzer, a German Professor of Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, stated in an interview with the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on May 5th: “My assumption is that the manipulation of the diesel engines and this fraud on the customer wouldn’t have happened if women have had a say in the top-level management.”. She also claims…
On April 30, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) published a Decision on Romania’s condemnation for non-compliance with Directive 2008/50/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on air quality and cleaner air for Europe. Romania has been tried for failing to meet its obligations regarding air quality and for systematically…
Worldwide many influential religious and political leaders are linking the coronavirus to the legislation of same-sex marriage. They claim that the outbreak of the pandemic is the punishment and reckoning of God. These statements are uncheckable by nature, but to show how widespread this kind of misinformation is, EUfactcheck gives an overview of the different…
“This crisis affects women differently than men”. This claim by Dutch politician, writer and former diplomat Petra Stienen who was elected in June 2015 as a member of the Senate of the Netherlands representing social-liberal party D66 is mostly true.
On May 3, 2020, Monica Anisie, the Romanian Minister of Education and Research, claimed in a TV interview at Digi24 that approximately 250,000 pre-university Romanian students do not have access to technology, and as a result, they are not able to attend the online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. This statement is mostly false,…
Reuters has published a topic concerning “Slovenian government called an official end to its coronavirus epidemic, becoming the first European country to do so” on 15th of May 2020. Wrote by Marja Novak, The claim turns out to be true. The Slovenian government late on Thursday called an official end to its coronavirus epidemic, becoming…
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.
At the EJTA Teachers’ Conference in Dortmund (October 2019) practical details were discussed and a new publication schedule was created for autumn 2019.
By January-February 2019 a manual with guidelines and tips & tricks will be published and on 13-14 February 2020 a second Bootcamp will be organised in Ljubljana, with financial help from the Evens Foundation. This Train the Trainer will be focussing on Central Eastern European countries, but also on new participants that want to publish on the platform.
All the information about this event: nadia.vissers@ap.be
“What is this politician saying??” Did you read or hear a politician or public figure make a questionable claim? Send us an email with the claim and maybe we will fact-check it.
Please include the source (url and date) where you found the claim.
