Political Journalist Tweets Repeat Rather Than Fact Check Presidential Candidate Claims

Twitter_logo_blueA recently published paper in The International Journal of Press/Politics says that 60 percent of tweets by political journalists during debates repeat a presidential candidate’s claims rather than fact check them for accuracy.

The Poynter Institute yesterday reported on the paper by the University of Texas School of Journalism’s Mark Coddington, Logan Molyneux and Regina Lawrence in which they looked at the tweets of 430 journalists sent off during the 2012 presidential debates.

“They found that 60 percent of the journalist tweets ‘reflected traditional practices of ‘professional’ objectivity: stenography—simply passing along a claim made by a politician—and ‘he said, she said’ repetition of a politician’s claims and his opponent’s counterclaim…Journalists largely repeated the claims and statement of candidates, rather that check or challenge them.”

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