EUfactcheck takes another course during the corona crisis because we want to safeguard the journalistic and methodological quality of the published fact checks.
Times are strange and unpredictable now, with governmental regulations straining the work of journalists, with media dealing with changing truths from one hour to the next, with the undefeatable speed of social media countering false claims and statements, with difficulties for students of journalism to contact experts.
The educational core of our project (we’re not a 24/7 fact-checking site) and the intensive coaching of our students are also influenced by the closure of universities all over Europe and restrictions on information.
That’s why we’ve asked our journalism students not to focus specifically on debunking claims on corona. These will mainly turn out to be uncheckable anyway or have already been checked by other fact checkers. We did ask our students to publish blog posts about the media approaches and to monitor how journalism is handling this changed reality in Europe and beyond. If the circumstances allow it, our students can choose to check news on corona.
We will keep you informed with reliable and fact based information.
This claim has been made in several Dutch election programs for the upcoming European elections. The problem boils down to the definition of a profession, but we rate the claim as mostly false.
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.…
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…
“Yearly, 825 billion euros in tax payments are being evaded in the European Union. On top of that, the EU loses 160 to 190 billion euros due to tax avoidance.” This is a claim by Belgian politician and MEP Kathleen Van Brempt. Astronomical numbers, but where do they come from? And how reliable can these…
YES! (Young European Survey) is a project created by the youths of different political parties. It was born with the purpose of knowing the claims of young Europeans citizens regarding the elections on the 26th of May. The organization created a survey to define the future of the European Union. However, the method used to…
Member of the European Parliament Petri Sarvamaa claimed that small and medium-sized enterprises employ 90 percent of the workforce in the EU area. This false claim was made on 12th April 2019 in a press meeting at the Finnish bureau of the European Parliament in Helsinki. Sarvamaa made the claim when asked what differences parties…
During a public hearing of a committee of the German parliament, Marc Bernhard of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) criticized the German strategy for climate protection. To his mind, reducing national CO2 emissions is not effective. In this fact check we show that Bernhard uses correct numbers but interprets them in a misleading…
In an interview in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen (paywall) on the 7th of May, Belgian liberal politician Vincent Stuer says that Europe is not able to deal with the way Spain treats the Catalonian separatists. According to him the European Union has no hard power to sanction Spain. We rate this claim as false.…
In March 2019, the German Teachers‘ Association approved of the decision of the EU Parliament to abolish the time change. However, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of the association, thinks there is a health risk for students if a country switches to summer time permanently: The probability of sleeping and learning problems, depression and diabetes has…
As part of his pre-election campaign, a Croatian candidate in European elections Mr Karlo Ressler of the currently ruling party Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), claimed that the youth unemployment halved since the EU accession [since HDZ is in power] and optimistically stated that since then 96,000 new jobs have opened. Both statements are true, however,…
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.
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.
