Quick Take Facebook and Instagram users are sharing a fake tweet attributed to President Donald Trump that suggests the president’s critics won’t get direct government payments to ease the financial burden of the coronavirus pandemic. Full Story As the White House and Congress work on a massive stimulus package to […]
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Prank Posts Mislead on Direct Government Payments for Coronavirus
Quick Take The Trump administration has proposed a plan to provide direct payments to some U.S. citizens, beginning April 6, to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus. But a prank post circulating on Facebook falsely states that the government is sending out checks every week and claim forms are […]
Trump’s Statements About the Coronavirus
“This is a pandemic,” President Donald Trump said at a March 17 press conference. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” While it’s not possible to know what Trump “felt,” there’s no doubt that Trump had minimized the threat of the new coronavirus for […]
Q&A on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of a Q&A we published Jan. 30. Much has changed since then. An outbreak of viral pneumonia that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 has sickened more than 200,000 people and led to more than 8,000 deaths […]
No ‘Huge Red Flag That Fraud Occurred’ in Mass. Primary
Quick Take A misleading tweet uses a faulty interpretation of exit polling in Massachusetts and incomplete reporting on two other races to claim there were irregularities in Super Tuesday elections. Full Story A misleading tweet casting doubt on the integrity of the primary elections on Super Tuesday got more than […]
Viral Posts Falsely Align Viruses to Election Years
Quick Take Viral posts on social media claim COVID-19 is no worse than other outbreaks that have occurred in “every election year,” suggesting that the new coronavirus is being “hyped” to hurt President Donald Trump. But most of the dates cited to defend those conclusions about previous outbreaks are misleading […]
Video Doesn’t Show ‘#ElectionFraud’ in Illinois
Quick Take Social media posts claim that a video clip is evidence of “#ElectionFraud.” The clip, which accidentally aired on TV, actually shows a standard TV newsroom rehearsal ahead of the Illinois primaries. Full Story Usually practice makes perfect. But that wasn’t the case for one central Illinois news station […]
A Guide to Our Coronavirus Coverage
Today we launched a new Coronavirus Coverage page to help readers navigate our website and more easily find the articles they want to read. The landing page provides a list of our latest stories — those published in the past seven days — our most popular political fact-checking stories, our […]
Video: The Biden-Sanders Debate
In this video, we review three claims from the first head-to-head presidential primary debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders: Biden denied that he ever talked on the Senate floor “about the necessity” of “cutting Social Security,” as Sanders claimed. Biden did call for a one-year […]
Trump Misrepresents Google Coronavirus Website
President Donald Trump and other officials misleadingly suggested that tech behemoth Google was working on a screening website that large numbers of Americans could soon use to see if they should be tested for the new coronavirus. The website, however, is actually a project of Google’s sister company Verily and […]