Washington Post’s Truth Teller and the future of robots doing journalism
BY DAVID HOLMES
ON JANUARY 29, 2013
At some point in the history of letters, fact-checking went from a foundational part of journalism to a specialization practiced by few to a buzzwordy media trend, alternately praised and dismissed depending on what politician was getting called out. During the 2012 election, a race notable for its high levels of deceit, fact-checking was especially prevalent, and the Washington Post, along with Politifact and Factcheck.org, were leaders in the field.
Now the Post has debuted a real-time fact-checking program called Truth Teller. It transcribes political speeches using voice-to-text technology and automatically cross-checks the speaker’s claims against databases of facts, half-truths, and lies. In one example, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy repeats the well-worn claim that taxing the rich will result in the loss of 700,000 jobs. As he says this, the word “False” materializes in big red letters along with a link to a blog post where the Post’s resident fact-checker Glenn Kessler debunks the claim.
To be clear, the program is still a work in progress, but the Post’s executive producer for digital news Cory Haik told Poynter’s Craig Silverman, “The goal is to get closer to … real-time than what have now. It’s about robots helping us to do better journalism — but still with journalists.”
more
http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/29/washington-posts-truth-teller-and-the-future-of-robots-doing-journalism/
= new reply since forum marked as read
