EUfactcheck #10 ‘EU Elections 2024’

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.

Latest fact-checks

False: The cost of Irish reunification – £2.7 billion pounds?

With Brexit raising tensions ever higher in the British political landscape, talks of reuniting Ireland and Northern Ireland have surfaced again. In a 2016 document titled ‘Towards a United Ireland’, Irish political party Sinn Fein outlined how the reunification of Ireland and Northern Ireland might not be as costly as is popularly believed. Outlining the…

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fact checking

Mostly False: ‘Sustainable thinkers are often the biggest polluters’

On March 7 2019 an article called ‘sustainable thinkers are often the biggest polluters’ was published by the Dutch RTL News. In that article, they link pollution to sustainable thinking. Sustainable thinkers would be above-average polluters. This is what the author of this article wrongly concludes from a research of Peter Kanne, member of I&O…

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True: “98% of urban population in the EU is exposed to ozone levels that exceed the WHO-guidelines”

On the 30th of April, an article was posted on the website of Sp.a, the Belgian social democratic party, about air pollution. Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian politician and member of the European Parliament, stated in this article that 98% of the EU’s urban population is exposed to ozone levels that exceed WHO guidelines. The…

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True: “80 percent of the European money for agriculture goes to the 20 percent largest farmers”

The current European agricultural policy runs until 2020. The discussions about this policy for 2021 have therefore started. Following this discussion, Menno Bentveld, a reporter at the Dutch national radio station NPO Radio 1 called Bas Eickhout, MEP on behalf of GroenLinks. Eickhout claimed that 80 percent of the European agricultural money goes to the…

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False: “The travel time from The Netherlands to Berlin by train is as long as twenty years ago”

In an election debate in the Dutch news programme Nieuwsuur, European taxes for plane tickets were discussed. If and when this becomes reality, fast alternatives are important. According to Esther de Lange, member of the European Parliament for the Christian democrats, alternatives are still not fast enough to be an option. She said: ‘The travel…

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fact checking

Mostly false: “Contributing to climate policy […] appears to be not that popular with the members of GreenLeft”

Dutch party leader Derk Jan Eppink of Forum for Democracy (FvD) claimed in a televised elections’ debate on 13 May that the Dutch Greens are not very eager to contribute financially to climate change. Eppink based his claim on a recent survey by Ipsos and, as it seems, on an article in national newspaper De Telegraaf.…

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fact-check uncheckable

Uncheckable: “According to studies, the majority of Germans, French, and Brits do not even want to defend their own country”

On April 2, Finnish politician Asseri Kinnunen sent out a claim on Twitter about the willingness to defend one’s country in the three most populous EU countries. Kinnunen is the chairman of The Finns Party Youth and a candidate in the upcoming European Parliament elections. The tweet was part of the discussion around the Finnish…

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Latest blog posts

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Group photo EUFACTCHECK 240119

The EUFACTCHECK project

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.

Our history

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 

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