Penn and CNN partner to keep presidential candidates honest

When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy, the fallacy didn’t get past FactCheck.org.

Neither did an incomplete claim by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said “everybody in government” with whom she emailed knew she was using a personal email account and server as secretary of state. She forgot to mention that some officials in the Obama Administration—including President Obama—did not know she was using it exclusively for government business.

The nonpartisan fact-checking site, a 12-year-old project of Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), is now partnering with CNN to examine claims made by candidates along the 2016 presidential campaign trail. About every week until the 2016 presidential election, Jake Tapper, host of CNN’s Sunday morning show “State of the Union,” will host online videos based on FactCheck.org’s reporting on the candidates’ statements.

“Our whole mission here is to reach as many people as we can,” says Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.org. “We already work with The Huffington Post, USA Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and others, and we’re always trying to partner with established media outlets to get our work out there.”

Kiely says it was a no-brainer when CNN approached FactCheck.org to collaborate on the series, and says he is excited about the opportunity to work with someone as reputable as Tapper, an anchor at CNN and the cable news channel’s chief Washington correspondent.

“Tapper is great, he’s a pro,” says Kiely. “I couldn’t be more thrilled with the idea of working with somebody with his stature in the field. He’s a great spokesman for fact-checking and FactCheck.org.”

As part of the collaboration, Kiely sends CNN senior producer Teddy Davis regular lengthy emails full of what the FactCheck.org team is working on, and what has recently been published.  

“Emails are exchanged and telephone conversations happen pretty much every day,” Kiely says.

CNN settles on a topic on Wednesdays, and a show is taped every Thursday.

The FactCheck.org team currently consists of six full-time staffers and four student workers, who fact-check all the presidential candidates’ appearances on national television. Since FactCheck.org’s creation by APPC Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson and longtime political reporter Brooks Jackson, its work has been a year-round effort, even when major elections aren’t in progress.

“What we’re doing here is trying to educate the public about the issues,” Kiely says. “To the extent that policy decisions are made based on the facts and to what extent we can contribute to that dialogue is very important to the whole political process.”

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