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.
On May 4th, Nicola Zingaretti – newly elected secretary of the Italian Democratic Party – firmly stated that, “under the current Lega – Movimento 5 stelle government, the unemployment rate is consistently growing”. This claim has turned out to be false.
In mid-June 2018, US president Donald Trump tweeted that the crime rate in Germany rose by more than ten percent because of the immigrants who were allowed into the country in recent years. Is this just another speculative Trump-Tweet or a disconcerting development? Since the beginning of 2017, the Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees…
Dutch MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy recently tweeted that there are still millions of fraudulent diesel cars driving around in Europe. He also claims that the European Union does not take any proper action against those vehicles. But are these numbers correct? And do EU-countries truly ignore what is better known as ‘dieselgate’?
According to a study conducted by the Ifo, under the leadership of German physics professor Christoph Buchal, the CO2 emissions of electric vehicles are higher than those of diesel cars. The Belgian newspaper De Standaard published this claim on their website on the 18th of April. We rate this claim as mostly false. Europe wants…
A candidate for the upcoming European Parliament elections, Tihomir Lukanić, expressed his concern with the implementation of 5G network at a press conference held by a Croatian political party Živi Zid (Human Shield). The claim turns out to be mostly false. The statement rose some questions in the media and provoked discussion on the dangers…
Does crime increase with migration? German right-wing politicans like Alice Weidel of the right-wing populist party AfD says ‘yes’. The criminal statistics seem to support this claim but the number of suspected criminals is small in all population groups. This quote is an excerpt of a Facebook post Alice Weidel published on 25 March 2019.…
In an article from the news site ‘De Standaard’ (date: March 8th), Brussels Airlines claims that no one takes the airplane only to travel from Brussels to Paris. This statement was made in the debate on the impact of short flights on climate change. In the article there is no mention of which sources or data…
According to an article on the website of Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the EU has decided that in order to exterminate the raccoon from EU countries the only solution is to shoot them. We rate the claim as mostly false.
After the attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Australian senator Fraser Anning has claimed that Muslims are often executors of terrorist attacks. This claim has received worldwide attention. What do the statistics say about the religious background of terrorism? The statement was published by the Australian senator Fraser Anning on the 15th of…
It sounds great: 1500 to 2000 euro per year for every Dutch citizen, only because the Netherlands is a member of the European Union. This is what the Dutch progressive liberal party D66 states in a twitter response to a promotional ‘Nexit’ video by extreme right PVV leader Geert Wilders. To good to be true?
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
