MediaBugs teams up with NewsTrust’s Truthsquad to fix the news

Beginning this month we’re starting a partnership with two other great organizations that share MediaBugs’ vision of how to improve the error-correction process in journalism.

For several years now, NewsTrust.net has provided a platform for users to rate the quality and trustworthiness of news reports. Recently NewsTrust started a project called Truthsquad that presents a user with statements in the media by public figures and pundits, then asks for help in fact-checking the statements. Users contribute links and arrive at a collective judgment on the truth of the statement, then NewsTrust editors deliver a “verdict.”

NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin and I have been talking for some time about how our two organizations might collaborate, and we think we’ve found a model that’s worth trying. We’re also delighted to be working with Craig Silverman’s RegretTheError.com as part of this project. Craig, of course, is probably the world’s leading expert on corrections in the news (he’s also a MediaBugs adviser).

For the next several weeks, NewsTrust’s Truthsquad will run one statement a week through its fact-checking process. Then, each week, if the Truthsquad concludes that a media report was in error, we’ll file a bug here at MediaBugs and see if we can elicit a response or get it corrected.

For instance, our first Truthsquad report focused on a clip from Fox Business that criticized President Obama’s India trip for its $200-million-a-day tab. As you can see, the Truthsquad consensus and verdict concluded that the $200 million a day figure was completely unsupported. So today we filed a bug report relating to the story. We’ll keep you posted on its progress.

In other words, we’re wedding an organized fact-checking process on the one hand with an accountable error-correction process on the other. We think this is something that has never been tried before! If it sounds valuable to you, head over to NewsTrust and join in the Truthsquadding — then over to MediaBugs to help us fix the errors we find.

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Comments

  1. Carlos R. Candelaria says:

    This seems like an exciting collaboration.I can’t wait for the results from this.

Trackbacks

  1. […] NewsTrust has previously employed its tools for vetting journalism on a national level, their newest test, NewsTrust Baltimore, takes things to a smaller scale — namely one where […]

  2. […] article from Read Write Web on NYTimes.com. At the end of 2010, we conducted a second pilot with MediaBugs.org and RegretTheError.com, focusing on statements from reporters or commentators (not politicians). […]