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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

More Guns, Fewer Murders?

January 10, 2011

On CNN’s "State of the Union with Candy Crowley," Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah perpetuated a falsehood about gun ownership and lower murder rates.

Lee: And to the contrary, I think there is abundant research suggesting that in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate actually goes down.

That’s not true. A causal relationship between prevalence of gun ownership and crime hasn’t been established by researchers. We looked into this subject in 2008 and found that the statistical relationship is the opposite of what Lee said for murder,

Reid Wrong on Jobs, Tea Party

January 10, 2011

On NBC’s "Meet the Press," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid exaggerated the latest job gains in the manufacturing sector and grossly minimized tea party victories in the 2010 midterm elections.
In the interview — which NBC taped a day before the Jan. 8 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Ariz. — Reid spoke about the latest employment numbers. The economy added 113,000 private sector jobs in the month of December, dropping the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent from 9.8 percent.

A New Home for FactCheck.org

January 1, 2011

With the New Year we are getting new GPS coordinates.
FactCheck.org is moving to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s new headquarters building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Our web address, of course, remains unchanged.

 
Our new physical address:

FactCheck.org
c/o Annenberg Public Policy Center
202 S. 36th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3806

Our telephone numbers:

Annenberg Public Policy Center: (215) 898-9400
FactCheck.org News Desk: (215) 573-7070

Annenberg’s Washington, D.C., office — which has been our home since we began operations in 2003 —

Holiday Announcement

December 23, 2010

Both the Washington and Philadelphia offices of FactCheck.org will be closed from Dec. 24 through Monday, Jan. 3, in observance of Christmas and New Year’s.
When we resume, we will be taking a different approach to our coverage of weekend public affairs shows. We will continue to monitor them and to research any dubious factual claims by public officials and political candidates. And we will post separate items on any that we discover to be false or misleading.

Sunday Replay

December 14, 2010

Surprisingly – considering that the topic du jour was taxes, which means numbers – the flubs and fibs on the Dec. 12 talk shows were few, and relatively minor.
Not So Out-of-Context
On "Meet the Press," the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, claimed host David Gregory had taken a quote by White House economic adviser Larry Summers "a little out of context." Not so. Goolsbee and Gregory were discussing the tax deal President Barack Obama had worked out with congressional Republicans.

Cash Attack Conference

December 14, 2010

On Monday, FactCheck.org hosted a post-election conference on political advertising in the 2010 election by outside groups. Our liberal and conservative panelists played some TV ads to illustrate their points – and we couldn’t resist pointing out that we had found a few of them to be misleading. Here’s what we said about some of those ads:

"Crumble,” by California Working Families for Jerry Brown. The ad, funded by a coalition of labor unions, criticizes Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s years as CEO of eBay.

Obama’s Social Security Stumble

December 8, 2010

President Barack Obama rewrote the history of the Social Security system during a Dec. 7 press conference, claiming that only widows and orphans originally benefited from the program. Obama was defending a deal the administration reached recently with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for all Americans for another two years:

Obama, Dec. 7: And that means because it’s a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions, it means that in order to get stuff done,

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Just Argue

December 8, 2010

The Dec. 5 edition of ABC’s “This Week” played host to a heated discussion about the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. Claims pinged back and forth regarding the recent Pentagon investigation of troop attitudes toward the law. But we caught several people putting the wrong figures with the wrong questions, or otherwise misrepresenting the results.
First, Gen. Wesley Clark misrepresented how many service members thought having an openly gay colleague would not affect their combat performance:

Clark: And what the survey showed is that essentially all of the service members,

Sunday Replay

December 6, 2010

Almost all of the misinformation coming from politicians on the Sunday shows this week had to do with the expiring Bush tax cuts, which Congress is expected to vote on this week. Coming in second was the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy for gay servicemembers — we’ll post Tuesday on an exchange that took place on that topic on ABC’s "This Week."
Polling Problems
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona gave a misleading description of public opinion on the Bush tax cuts.

The TSA ‘Strip Search’ That Wasn’t

November 23, 2010

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah tweeted Nov. 21 that an airport security officer strip-searched a young boy. Chaffetz linked to a YouTube video that showed a shirtless boy being searched at a Utah airport. But the lawmaker jumped to a false conclusion. Both the Transportation Security Administration and the person who videotaped the incident say the boy’s father removed his son’s shirt, not TSA officers.

Chaffetz’s mis-tweet is just one example of the recent outcry against the TSA’s new imaging machines and pat-down techniques.