The site re-rated the promise as “Half True.” Eventually, it turned out that none of those assumptions were true, and in 2013 PolitiFact was forced to rank that same statement as its “Lie of the Year.” During the time that Obama’s “impossible” promises were being rated “True,” a campaign assertion by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) that Obamacare would involve “mandates and fines for small businesses” was rated “False” by PolitiFact’s editors, even though some small businesses would have to either provide health coverage for their employees or pay into a government pool program to assist such workers in obtaining coverage.
In April 2019, Poynter posted an “UnNews” list of 515 news websites that it considered “unreliable.” The list quickly came under attack for unreliability and poor methodology, and was pulled down within a few days. In the decades after Poynter’s death, CQ added analysis and opinion to its coverage and its influence grew to the point where long-time “NBC Nightly News” anchor John Chancellor reportedly characterized CQ as having a “Biblical status in Washington and every newsroom in the country.” In 2009, Times Publishing sold CQ to UK-based The Economist Group, which merged it with its In 2016, Poynter’s Times Publishing Company purchased the Responding to criticism of a nonprofit founded to support journalism purchasing a newspaper with the intention of closing it down and laying off its journalists, Times Publishing Company chairman and CEO Paul Tash attempted to justify the decision by saying, “Whatever is the number of jobs that is lost now pales in comparison to the number of jobs that have been lost already in newspaper publishing generally, because of the economic pressures that have been upon us… It’s also smaller than the number of jobs that would be lost if this kind of unstable situation had continued.” In 2017, Times Publishing announced that it had received a $12 million loan from a consortium of partially anonymous local business owners to assist it in refinancing debt related to the Times Publishing also blamed the tariffs for their decision to cease payments to a trust for Nelson Poynter’s 92-year-old widow, Marion K. Poynter. Marketers can create blacklists, but many of those lists have been out-of-date or incomplete.Aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the UnNews index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.Journalist Training: Poynter offers what it claims is the “world’s largest online journalism curriculum,” in addition to a range of in-person training classes and courses at its Florida headquarters and newsrooms around the country.MediaWise: Launched by a grant from Craigslist founder and increasingly-prominent left-wing donor Craig Newmark and funded by Google.org, this partnership with Stanford University is aimed at educating teenagers on “sorting fact from fiction online” through middle school and high school curricula. The program’s “ambassador” is NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt.International Fact-Checking Network: Through this initiative, Poynter helps train “fact-checker” journalists in other countries. The PolitiFact team at the St. Petersburg Times won a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 2009 for their coverage of the 2008 presidential election.