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.
As climate change becomes ever more apparent, calls for action and consistent measures are multiplying. Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), says as part of the launch of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (EGR21) that to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, we have eight years to nearly halve greenhouse gas…
On November 16, 2021, Russia Today reported that Covid-19 vaccines bring $1000 every second to Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna companies from wealthy nations, while low-income nations remain unvaccinated. This information is mostly true.
At the beginning of September 2021, a video report appeared on the website of the television news network Euronews with this headline: “Covid-19 divides Europe into two parts”. The author refers to the results of a study by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), which appeared in the same month. However, Euronews’ claim, that…
Nikola Milina, the head of Croatian police, said that the violent pushbacks at the Croatian-Bosnian border filmed in October 2021 were an “individual event” and that he doesn’t want that to “affect the praise the police receive for their everyday sacrificial work”. Data from NGOs and media reports show that these events may have been…
On September 7th 2021, Alice Weidel, member of the German parliament and part of the AfD, a right-winged populist party, claimed that only 11% of German citizens feel free in their everyday lives. She stated that the disoriented and excessive corona policy of the German federal government has played a considerable role in this. We…
German politician Stephan Pilsinger (CSU) has criticized the considerations of the newly elected German government to decriminalize cannabis. He claims that after legalization, cannabis consumption will increase. Pilsinger refers to studies from the USA. Even though there are numbers which support his claim, there is no clear evidence that legalization automatically leads to more consumption.…
On 22nd of September 2021, the member of the Austrian National Council Dr. Dagmar Belakowitsch made a statement during a speech in front of the national council where she talked about the side effects of the Covid-19 vaccination and said: “I mean those who have strokes after the vaccinations. This is a very common side…
On March 30, 2021, ZEIT online claimed More hospitalizations of children with depression. Already before Covid 19 the number of young patients with depression increased by 24 percent in 2019. This claim turns out to be mostly true. The article addresses the issue of depression in children and adolescents. The author says that even before…
On 2 October 2021, Conner Rousseau (Vooruit) said in an interview that Belgium is the country that gives the largest amount of money to polluting diesel. Is this statement true? And maybe even more important: how and why does Belgium spend money on this fuel? After doing research and interviewing experts we can say that…
On 5 October 2021, British broadcaster and former politician Nigel Farage made a statement about wind energy in September 2021. During the show “FOX Business” on the broadcaster FOX he said that “in September wind energy only produced 2% of the energy needs”. This statement is mostly true. Nigel Farage is a British broadcaster and…
The “online” lecture was supposed to start in 5 minutes, when I accidentally checked news and heard that 4800 cases were reported in the country. I was surprised to enter the lecture while a friend sent me a message on the phone: ‘’Do we have fun somewhere today? I imagined where we could have gone,…
Which tweet to choose? How can we get enough information to be sure of our prediction? And how to simplify complex information? What have we learned? Which tweet to choose? Environment and ecology are very hot topics nowadays. We can see a lot of new research about pollution, global warming and food waste, but because…
In this blog post you will find a reflection on the fact-checking process of four students from the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences. It was a really interesting and new experience to go through and we would surely recommend everyone who is just in the least bit interested in journalism, to go through…
The word “negru”, which literally means black in Romanian, was carelessly uttered by football referee Sebastian Coltescu and caused a big scandal as the players left the football field on the fourteenth minute of the PSG-Istanbul match. As it turned out later, the accursed word was uttered not by Coltescu himself, but by his assistant…
We decided to turn to the media about the versions of what happened on August 20, 2020 with the Russian politician Alexei Navalny. We analyzed articles from reliable sources in Germany and Russia and identified the most common positions in the case of the possible poisoning of Alexei Navalny by Novichok. We found contrasting views.…
On 12 November 2020 the Russian news agency TASS reported that he Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russian Federation, represented by Sergey Lavrov, the Head of the Ministry, had imposed sanctions against Germany and France because of the case of Alexey Navalny. In this blog we explain how we factchecked this claim to be mostly…
Coronavirus pandemic has been followed by a mass infodemic with several interest groups standing behind it. One of the directions of the infodemic includes false treatments, fake recommendations, and unverified protection methods. In Georgia, even doctors often become the source of such fake information, hazardous to human health. Fake news titled “Everything Will End Fatally:…
With the premiere of the documentary “Francesco” which happened at the Rome Film Festival in October 2020, controversial opinions arose in various media about two certain points in the film. Pope’s statements “homosexual people have a right to be in a family. They are children of God. Nobody should be thrown out or be made…
On October 14, 2020, Fox News posted an article with the headline: “Trump and public health system have saved 2 million lives in coronavirus pandemic.” However, this statement raised our doubts and suspicions. Newt Gingrich, the author, did not provide any statistics: there are no illustrations or links. Firstly, we decided to check the statistics:…
After the US elections, a prominent Croatian RTL TV news anchor Zoran Šprajc, made a comment in one of the most watched news shows in Croatia called RTL Direkt, assuming that the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer waited on purpose for the end of the elections to publish news about the vaccine against Covid-19. However, Pfizer explained…
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
