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 March 22nd 2021, the news site Nieuws365 published an official statement of the right-wing populist political party Vlaams Belang. According to their chairman of the department of Brussels and senator Bob de Brabandere, 398 prisoners who were classified as radicalised were released in the past five years, which he claims is problematic.This statement turns…
On May 8th 2021 Melissa Fleming, who works at the UN as Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, tweeted about a great inequality between the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations. She claimed that high income countries have received more than 80% of the vaccinations in comparison to low income countries who obtained only 0.3%. The claim turns out…
On Wednesday 14 April, an article (pay wall, Dutch) appeared on the website of Flemish newspaper De Morgen on a WWF report (Dutch) on tropical deforestation. It states that Belgium is one of the largest deforesters in Europe, per capita. The claim turns out to be mostly true. Belgium is indeed one of the European…
The refugee policies within EU states are struggling with transparency and consistency. According to a Deutsche Welle article, Catherine Woolard (director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles) said that asylum decision-making in Europe even resembles a lottery game, meaning that people often end up being rejected even though they need protection. By researching…
On 16 March 2021, BBC Online reported on negative health effects linked to noise pollution. The article claims that living near an airport or motorway has been shown to have a negative impact on our health. This is also confirmed by scientists who point to the effects of noise on humans. This claim is true.…
“The corona crisis has reduced migration flows worldwide. That has implications for prosperity. In rich countries, economic growth without immigration risks being undermined.” This claim from the German statistical bureau Destatis, published in Belgian newspaper De Standaard from 10 February 2021, turns out to be mostly true. Immigration is a global phenomenon with Europe as…
At the Climate Summit organised by the United States in April, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that the United Kingdom is “halfway to net-zero”. It is correct that the UK is halfway on their net-zero policy. However, the claim is only mostly true, as research shows the scenario is not as optimistic as the…
In April, a prominent Croatian news outlet called Jutarnji list published an article stating that members of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), including nine Croats, receive a daily allowance of 290 euros per day for online meetings, and these per diems are intended to reimburse travel expenses. The statement that Jutarnji list reports…
The German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) criticizes the refugee policy by Angela Merkel in Germany. In a press release from April 2019, Chairman Alexander Gauland claimed: Migrants drive up the crime rate in Germany. Especially now with the federal election upcoming, the AfD still holds this position – even though the refugee crisis is…
On 5thMarch 2021, Tagesschau.de reported on the energy supply in Germany and stated wind as the most important source of electricity. They claim that in 2020 for the first time more electric power had been generated with wind energy than with coal and that renewable energy achieves a record high. The claim turns out to…
On 15 June the borders of the Member States of the European Union and those belonging to the Schengen area and the United Kingdom will reopen. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio called it the “D-Day of European Tourism”.
Since the coronavirus outbreak, there has been an ongoing conversation within the media worldwide about weather and its potential impact on the virus. Weather is a complex topic, as there are a lot of aspects to be considered. Elements such as temperature, humidity, latitude, people staying inside more when it is cold, vitamins due to…
The coronavirus made big changes to lives all across the world. Travel plans and events have been cancelled, exams have to be made at home and we haven’t visited friends and family for weeks now. We discovered that the coronavirus also caused some problems in the factchecking process. 1 Contacting companies The first difficulty we…
Despite the good intensions of change, Coronavirus seems to highlight the limits of our society. We are in a moment of exceptional crisis, which is often compared to the one of 2008, however as the Covid-19 is an unknown and new disease, its economic and social impact is equally new. If we consider trends in…
Writers Julia Harder and Gwen Rochat, Journalism students at Windesheim University Zwolle, The Netherlands, noticed a tweet from the Icelandic Prime Minister, saying Iceland is the frontrunner in gender equality. In making this factcheck, we realized there is no yes/no answer to our question: the situation is far more complex. For example, we expected that…
In times of Corona, making the right decisions is not easy. Different experts come up with quotes and points of view about this pandemic. However, some of them are dangerously hard below the belt. I am mainly talking about the statement “After the plague, Corona is now entering Europe through Italy”. Not only is this…
Coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied with a dissemination of fake news and conspiracy theories. Georgia was no exception, as various groups, including pro-Kremlin, ultra-national, and radical groups have been referring to COVID-19 as an artificially created virus, spreading fear, and associating the virus with the 5G Internet. One of the authors of the disinformation and…
During the first weeks of the pandemic, headlines were about people hoarding toilet paper and long-lasting goods such as pasta and dry yeast. The concern about agriculture and gardening industries started to gain headlines as the pandemic continued to spread We analysed media coverage of agricultural themes from March 19 until the end of April.
On February 2, 2020 new regulations on obtaining a visa to Schengen Area countries came into force. Considering the proposed changes we can assume that these innovation are supposed to simplify receiving a Schengen visa. That simplification is the most apparent for those, who visit the Schengen Area countries on a regular basis.
During this lockdown we started “media monitoring” of sports websites. This implies that we’ve been scanning different sports websites during Corona times to find out how they approach news reporting right now and if we could find any similarities or differences between them. During this period we decided to focus on three different sports websites,…
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
