Amazon Echo Plays A Role in Finding Political Truths

A team at the Duke Reporters Lab has been developing a fact-checking app for the Amazon Echo. Owners of the Echo can “ask the fact-checkers” about claims they hear on the news and social media. The development team is led by Bill Adair, professor of the practice of journalism and public policy and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site PolitiFact. Student researcher Julia Donheiser and project manager Rebecca Ianucci join Adair to talk through the promise and pitfalls of the project.

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Trump, ‘Fake News’ And Russia Coverage

President Donald Trump offers a consistently defiant response to allegations about the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 campaign: “fake news.” The Reporters’ Lab at Duke catalogued 111 Trump statements about “fake news” over the five months following his election. “Of all the times we found Trump referring to ‘fake news’ from Nov. 8 to April 7, 41 percent were either direct or indirect responses to news coverage about Russia’s role in the presidential campaign,” writes student researcher Riley Griffin.

Read More at Poynter.

 

Can President Trump Handle the Truth?

Since winning the White House, Donald Trump has employed the weapon of spreading falsehoods at specific times, often when he is losing control of the national story line. “These big falsehoods are different,” explains professor Bill Adair, who created PolitiFact, the fact-checking journalistic site that won a Pulitzer Prize. “They are like a neutron bomb. They just take over the discussion and obliterate a lot of other things that we should be discussing.”

Read More in TIME

 

A Novel Way to Help Readers Spot Fake News

Jack Zhou, an instructor in environmental politics, says some occupants of so-called “news bubbles” may prefer to accept fake news as truth. “The state of fragmented media may dull the potential practical impact of inoculation messages, particularly in terms of the audiences serviced by those media,” says Zhou, who has researched the identity politics of climate change.

Read More in the Christian Science Monitor