As Fact Check signs off after 11 years, here's your guide to being your own fact checker
As Fact Check signs off after 11 years, here's your guide to being your own fact checker
Eleven years ago, the first formal fact check was published at the ABC. A lot has been fact checked between then and now — here's how to spot a dubious claim.
Whilst I didn't always agree with their pronouncements, having a fact checker at this time seems to me a very important thing.
They include reference to "a new in-house verification reporting team, ABC News Verify", but that sounds like they'll only be verifying their own news, which is nice, but not the point.
I didn't read it that way. Sounds like for whatever reason the RMIT partnership is ending but ABC is going to carry on with it on their own.
This is probably a bad development. RMIT gave the work an extra sense of rigour and independence. It meant liberals and nationals, and conservatives in general couldn't dismiss their work as just more ABC lefty commie wokeratti greenie stuff, as so many of those people reflexively do now.
The ABC should immediately start looking for a new partner of similar calibre in this ongoing endeavour.
Hopefully the "ABC News" bit is just branding, rather than implying the scope of the checking. The ABC has started putting some things under its "ABC News" banner in recent years, I guess to indicate that they are a serious and trusted source of information.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It was almost 12 years ago that the first formal fact check was published on the ABC News website, an analysis of a claim about Australia's debt by then-prime minister Kevin Rudd, which the fledgling fact-checking unit found to be accurate.
The intervening years saw growing public policy challenges brought about by climate change, the Black Summer bushfires, a global pandemic and the Voice to Parliament referendum triggering an epidemic of misinformation, supercharged by social media.
Even though both parties may have produced the largest debt or deficit in nominal terms, when accounting for the size of the economy and the passage of time, this was overshadowed by the numbers racked up during World War II.
Scott Morrison fell into the trap of making misleading comparisons when, as prime minister, he claimed the COVID-19 recession was 30 times larger than the global financial crisis, with experts telling Fact Check the two downturns were fundamentally different in nature and shouldn't be compared.
In the months leading up to the 2022 election, Mr Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg made a series of claims to the effect that Australia had achieved greater reductions in carbon emissions than other comparable nations.
Heading the eponymously named Katter's Australian Party, the Queenslander declared that people were "entitled to their sexual proclivities, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom", before his demeanour darkened and he said he would spend no more time on the topic.
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