The Washington Post Fact Checker is 15 years old today, though strictly speaking that statement might merit a Pinocchio.
With a burst of four fact checks on the morning of Sept. 19, 2007 — of statements by Osama bin Laden, former senator Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) — our former colleague Michael Dobbs launched the Fact Checker.
By coincidence, the new feature appeared a few weeks after the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) unveiled PolitiFact. The original idea was that the Fact Checker would run through the 2008 election, so Dobbs closed up shop on Nov. 4, 2008, just 14 months later.
But Washington Post editors noticed that thousands of readers, searching the internet for information, every day kept coming back for the original campaign fact checks, even months after they were first posted. There was clearly a hunger for nonpartisan, fact-based research on public policy topics. So the Fact Checker was relaunched almost 12 years ago under my direction.
So that’s the caveat — there is a 26-month gap in our 15-year history. But we’re pleased to be one of the pioneering fact-checking organizations in the United States (along with FactCheck.org, launched in late 2003).
The growth of political fact-checking since 2007 has been astonishing and also gratifying.
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