Is That a Fact?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FACT CHECKING

All we want are the facts, Ma’am. – Sgt Joe Friday, in the classic TV series Dragnet. Often misquoted as Just the facts, Ma’am.

One of the questions I get asked quite often is What is the ABC Fact Checking Unit?—or as a slightly hard of hearing listener on ABC Radio asked, What is the ABC Fat Chicken Unit?. Chubby chooks aside, the answer is simple: we are journalists and researchers who examine claims made by public figures and determine whether they are factually correct.

For some readers the fact checks might serve to reinforce a negative view that all politicians are liars, but there is also evidence that fact checking actually encourages politicians and public figures to stick to the facts. A 2014 study into the effects of fact checking by Brendan Nyhan from Dartmouth College in the US and Jason Reifler from Exeter University in the UK found politicians being scrutinised by fact checking organisations were less likely to make inaccurate statements. At ABC Fact Check we know that politicians and their staffers are well aware of our work and don’t want to say anything that might become the focus of one of our checks.

Fact check journalism has emerged over the past decade as something of an antidote to the he said, she said style of reporting, as well as a concern that journalists are so busy reporting everything that is being said, they don’t have time to check to see if it’s actually true. How often have you heard someone on radio or seen them on TV say something interesting or surprising and you immediately wonder, Can that be right?. But, before you know it, the news cycle has sped onto something else, and we are left none the wiser. And then there is the situation where a politician attempts to manufacture truth by asserting—mantra like—a policy or situation until it becomes an accepted fact.

Some will argue that fact check journalism is nothing new. And it’s true that experienced journalists check the basic who, what, when, where facts in putting together a story, but there is a difference: in fact check journalism facts are the story. The search for answers that used to take hours in an archive, public records office or library is often just a few clicks or Google searches away. We live in an age of mass information and frequently mass misinformation on social media, the Internet and sadly in old media as well. Continuous news doesn’t always wait for the facts to be confirmed. Technology has not just made the new fact checking paradigm possible, it has also made it necessary.

In April 2013, television news in America, egged on by a torrent of tweets and fierce competition for ratings points, descended to new journalistic lows in its reporting of the Boston marathon bombing. The internet news axiom of never wrong for long, whereby news websites unlike newsprint could be updated and corrected once published, was suddenly evident on TV too. Unconfirmed reports about the bombers’ identity, their whereabouts, and their nationality all went to air. As did reports of their arrest and even of other (non-existent) bombings in the Boston area. Social media proved both a blessing and a curse—on the one hand providing compelling eyewitness accounts and important public safety information, yet also incorrectly identifying a young man as the bomber, vilifying him and leading him to commit suicide. Not so long ago journalists would make a call to confirm those reports before going live to air with it.

For consumers of news, absorbing information can seem like trying to drink from a fire hose, and not just at times of unpredictable events. The chatter continues all day every day on talk radio, television news, social media, the Internet, current affairs programs and panel discussion shows.

Some politicians appear to spend a lot more time in front of the news cameras than in front of the dispatch box in Parliament. And there are times when they simply get it wrong—either by accident or design, a slip of the tongue, a poor choice of words, lapsing into exaggeration or distortion. Many of us are left to scratch our heads and wonder—who is actually giving us the facts and who is stretching the truth?

Here in Australia there was a rush by media outlets to fact check the 2013 federal election, with a franchise of America’s Politifact starting up in conjunction with local TV and newspaper partners, and a more academic peer-reviewed approach to fact checking appeared on The Conversation website. And then came the ABC’s Fact Checking Unit setting up shop on social media, television, radio and the Internet.

Initially we were treated with scepticism, but now our conclusions are often quoted in Parliament by both government and opposition. Politicians respond to our inquiries and some ministers engage personally with our researchers. Our web traffic is growing along with our following on Twitter and Facebook.

For a variety of reasons only the ABC’s Fact Checkers remain in daily operation just a year later. But while there has been a high rate of attrition among fact checkers in Australia, overseas this new style of journalism has gone from strength to strength with more people employed in fact checking than ever before.

The United States can lay claim to having pioneered fact check journalism. It evolved from the methods of old print media mastheads like The New Yorker, where eagle-eyed sub-editors would take a journalist’s story and pick it apart, checking every detail, verifying quotes, names, times, places and dates before it would head to the section editors, the headline writers, the printers, the trucks and finally the news stand. Sadly, for revenue reasons many newspapers have since dispensed with fact checkers and in house sub-editors and indeed many of the journalists themselves, replacing them with spell check software and outsourced agency copy.

In the past decade or so in the United States, fact checkers working on dedicated online fact check sites have been employed to cut through the spin and help sort fact from fiction. They now scrutinise everything from presidential debates in real time to blockbuster Hollywood movies. They are the new breed of reporters, who earned their stripes on personal computers rather than typewriters, as familiar with data spread sheets as police rap sheets.

One of the pioneers of fact checking in America, the founder of Politifact, Bill Adair, was the organiser of a June 2014 fact checking summit at the London School of Economics, which drew fact check journalists from more than twenty countries, including Australia. Adair says some fact checkers around the world are operating under very difficult conditions, particularly in Eastern Europe [where] impartial fact checking can’t be done by newspapers and television networks because they are often controlled by the government or political parties. Instead, he says, it’s up to non-government organisations with independent media partners.

In recent conflict zones like Ukraine, fact checkers have served a valuable role in verifying or debunking photographs of alleged atrocities spread widely on social media. In countries struggling to emerge as democracies such as Egypt after the Arab Spring, fact checkers acted as a watchdog over promises made by elected President Mohamed Morsi with a so called Morsi Meter. Fact check journalists around the world are facing the same challenges, Bill Adair says, they get a lot of push-back from the politicians that they fact check … we’ve seen it in Chile, in Argentina, in Eastern Europe and the United States—fact checking really disrupts the status quo in politics.

Neil Brown, editor of The Tampa Bay Times newspaper, which publishes Politifact, told delegates in London that fact check journalism is here to stay: Politicians everywhere are changing their rhetoric in response to the movement, Brown said. But he also warned that politicians and public figures are getting smarter—making claims that have an element of truth—just enough to avoid a negative verdict like false or pants on fire. The price of our success with fact check journalism is that there will be more Half Trues. The better we do our job, the more difficult our job is going to get, Brown said.

Another occupational hazard for fact checkers is sooner or later they will upset most of their audience and face allegations of bias. One of America’s best known fact checkers, Glenn Kessler from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, says every day at least half of his readers get very annoyed with him. There is a certain percentage that appreciate that I am completely non-partisan and I don’t care whose ox is being gored, but that’s a dwindling band of people, and many people look at these fact checks through a partisan lens.

When the ABC decided to set up the Fact Checking Unit in mid-2013, a lot of thought and discussion went into how we would do our checks and deliver our verdicts. It was a brave step for a national broadcaster, which unlike commercial media outlets has a charter, which demands objectivity and impartiality. This new kind of fact check journalism requires us to deliver a verdict on politicians and other public figures—new territory for dear old Aunty ABC. Any firm conclusions, unless they are meticulous in their adherence to the research, can easily stray into subjective opinion. And how best to deliver them? Would we design a Politifact-style Fact-o-Meter or a Bulls**t Detector or maybe we should rank claims by the number of pork pies? One of the issues faced by fact checkers overseas was trying to shoe-horn a complex issue into maybe four or five pre-ordained verdict words. We also knew that it was the facts, not the motives of the personalities scrutinised that mattered.

At ABC Fact Check we acknowledged news consumers wanted both detailed analysis and a simple verdict. After all, you want to hear everything Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton think about a movie, but it’s also a good guide to know how many stars they give it. So it was decided that there should be no limit on the words to deliver our verdicts. Verdicts should match the analysis not the calibrations of a meter. We are blessed with a rich and descriptive language … so let’s use it. Our negative verdicts have included: Doesn’t Check Out, Scaremongering, Incorrect, Unfounded, Gaffe, Ill-informed, Doubtful, Exaggerated, Unsubstantiated, Wrong, Not the Full Story, Misleading and Spin. On the other end of the scale we’ve had positive findings such as: Checks Out, Correct, On the Money, Fair Bet, Stacks Up and Accurate. And somewhere in between have fallen: Ambiguous, Overstated, Conjecture, Overblown, Debatable, Arguable and Overreach.

Not all of our audience agree with the verdict words or the conclusions we draw, but you know what they say about not pleasing all the people all the time. We are proud to report that with well over 200 fact checks under our belts in our first year, we haven’t had to change a single one of our verdicts. You might be surprised at the push back we get from senior political figures, ministers and shadow ministers from all sides who have made angry phone calls, sent terse emails and asked pointed questions in parliament about our work. But despite the indignation and the occasional claims of bias by the left and right, we stand by everything we’ve published. Conversely, if we are ever wrong, we will say so openly and unambiguously.

John Barron

FACT CHECK FEEDBACK

Prime Minister Tony Abbott made clear his thoughts about ABC Fact Check during an interview on 29 January 2014 with Sydney radio shock jock Ray Hadley. The PM noted all sorts of things were happening at the ABC that were costing money including the launch of some fact checking entity. Fact checking, he said, should come naturally to any media organisation. In other words he questioned the need for fact checking journalism.

Six months on, Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss was quoting from an ABC Fact Check in Parliament. He responded in question time to opposition criticism of the government’s reforms on financial advice: The government is not watering down any consumer protection, he said, adding and it is not scrapping the best interest duty or reintroducing commissions.

This is a Labor Party scare campaign … If you want to have an ‘independent’ commentary on this matter, ABC’s Fact Check—hardly noted for being friendly to this side of politics— described suggestions that we are bringing back commissions as ‘scaremongering’.

This was one of many occasions when Coalition MPs have quoted Fact Check verdicts in support of policy changes. It’s not yet clear whether MPs on all sides acknowledge the significance of fact check journalism as a divergent form of journalism focussing on facts rather than analysis and opinion, but Fact Check verdicts are referred to frequently in public debate on the ABC and in Parliament.

Some of these instances are included at the end of relevant chapters, as a postscript to the issues under scrutiny.

WARNING!

Readers may find zombies roaming the pages of this book. Typically, when found incorrect, claims will stay dead and buried. But there are some claims that keep coming back again and again even though they have been found inaccurate. The Fact Checkers have come to describe those claims as zombies—the undead and seemingly unstoppable false facts that continue to lurch around our public discourse. Watch out!

TO THE VICTORS GO THE SPOILS

It’s easy to be cynical about politicians, and at times they can give us good cause for that cynicism.

Pollies are paid around three times more than the average Australian, with a humble backbencher raking in about $200,000 a year before allowances and entitlements kick in. The Prime Minister clears a cool half million and senior members of the government and opposition do quite nicely as well. And it’s not just the money, at the top there’s power —you can make things happen, you can change lives, you can steer the ship of state … you may even get a selfie taken with Barack Obama!

Yet it’s also true that many politicians are highly qualified in areas like the law and finance and are probably taking a significant pay cut to be there. It’s not exactly an easy job. Long days in parliament, policy work, committee work, electorate work and so much travel. Family life suffers, half the public probably hates you, the rest want something from you, and for what? A job that you effectively have to reapply for every three years at the ballot box, constant criticism from the other side of politics (and probably behind closed doors from your colleagues as well). To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, a politician’s lot is not a happy one.

Despite the burdens of elected office, a change of government is always a time of excitement and some uncertainty in Canberra. As power passes from one side to another, there are clear winners and losers and more than a few roosters turn to feather dusters. It can also be a time of telling decisions and rookie mistakes, and, as always, the media is ready to pounce at the slightest hint that snouts may be dipping into the trough.

It may be the cost of renos to their new office, or the size of their bookcase. Or, in the case of a group of WA Coalition MPs, their staff and families, it was the rather expensive use of a government VIP jet.

The government sent an RAAF Boeing 737 VIP jet over to get Liberal members from Western Australia to the opening of Parliament on 10 November 2013. The plane flew without passengers to Perth and came back to the nation’s capital with a crew of six and 26 Very Important Persons to witness the dawning of the age of Abbott.

The media did its best to rain on the Coalition’s parade by questioning frontbencher Christopher Pyne on the cost bringing an entourage of MPs to Canberra in a VIP jet. But Fact Check found the new education minister’s maths may not get an A+. Here’s what Mr. Pyne told reporters:

Federal parliamentarians travelling on official business are entitled to fly business class at public expense. In limited circumstances their families and nominees are also covered, again for business class. To Canberra from Perth that isn’t cheap. Virgin’s cheapest business class fare on the day was $1,723.88, but they had some tickets going for $2,163.88. Qantas was charging $1,960 per head. Twenty six business class tickets would have cost at least $44,820 and up to $56,260; most people’s annual income, just to get a few MPs to their first day at work.

VIP flights aren’t cheap either. The Fact Checkers were able to find out average costs from various departmental sources. Fuel, landing fees and airport handling fees were costed in 2012 by the Defence Department at $3,450 per hour, making $28,462 for an average return flight to Perth of just over 8 hours.

Documents obtained by Fairfax Media in 2008 indicate that maintenance costs for the Department of Defence’s two 737s worked out at $5,552 per aircraft per hour—a further $45,806 for an average Canberra-Perth return flight.

On top of the total of these two figures, $74,268, there are some unknown amounts—the cost of crewing the aircraft with six cockpit and cabin crew for its return flight, and increases since 2008 and 2012 when the average figures were computed. Clearly it was far costlier to use the VIP aircraft than to buy commercial tickets.

This is without even allowing for the so called fixed costs including leasing and departmental personnel, funded out of the Defence budget. In 2008 the average leasing fee per contracted flight hour for special purpose flights by the 737s exceeded $8,000. If that were to be counted it would add in over $66,000 for the return flight.

How much dearer it was to use the VIP 737 instead of Qantas or Virgin depends on costs that are not known with certainty, and on what costs you can count in. But there’s no doubt it was a lavish way to get people over for the big day.

With the newly elected Coalition government taking power in Canberra, one of the first big announcements was Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s cabinet. The senior foreign affairs portfolio went to his Liberal Party deputy Julie Bishop. However, as it turned out, every other cabinet post was to be occupied by a man.

One of many who commented on the gender imbalance in the new cabinet was the 2013 Australian of the year and former pioneering magazine editor, Ita Buttrose. Ms. Buttrose had made a career out of taking on previously male dominated senior publishing roles. She saw the rather blokey Coalition cabinet as fresh evidence of the glass ceiling—the invisible barrier that keeps women from making it to the very top, or even earning the same income as men. Ms. Buttrose spoke about the issue on ABC Radio:

The indicators that the Fact Checkers looked at confirmed that women had not penetrated senior levels of government and business in large numbers. Under the previous government there had been an all time record of six women in cabinet, but there is now only one.

Australia was 21st in the world in 2001 in terms of female representation in national parliament, but had slipped to 41st by 2012, as women increased their presence in other nations. In federal Parliament men still outnumber women by close to three-to-one.

Only 31% of Order of Australia recipients were women, and only 37% of senior Commonwealth public service posts were held by women. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures women in 2012 held 3.5% of the CEO positions in Australia’s top 200 publicly listed companies, an increase on 2% in 2002. They held 12% of board directorships, up from 8% in 2002.

Recent research in private sector corporations showed women occupying only 10% of senior management positions.

Disparity is also apparent in incomes, at many economic levels. Amongst new graduates starting work, women’s salaries on average are about 10% lower than men’s. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency reported in August 2013 that the pay gap between the sexes had increased since 2004, when women’s average salary was 85% of the men’s average. It had since fallen to 82%.