PETERSBURG, Fla. & SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (April 2, 2019) – The Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit dedicated to excellence in journalism, announces an exclusive new partnership between its fact-checking news organization, PolitiFact, and KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) – the trusted source of health policy information – through Kaiser Health News (KHN), KFF’s editorially independent national health and health policy newsroom.

Through this first topic-based fact-checking partnership, PolitiFact staffers will train and work with the KHN editorial team to report, write and edit content using PolitiFact’s fact-checking methodology and will be on-hand throughout the course of the partnership to ensure the quality and execution within its code of ethics and editorial standards. All fact-checks are reviewed and rated on the Truth-O-Meter by three PolitiFact editors before publication.

Under this initial two-year partnership, both organizations will produce and publish health-related fact-checks on a new co-branded digital channel that will be accessible from either politifact.com or kffhealthnews.org. PolitiFact and KHN anticipate publishing health-related fact-checks beginning later this spring.

“Politicians debate health care and invoke research and stats with an authority that may not always be accurate or in context,” said Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute. “This collaboration between two of the most credible and respected brands in journalism — PolitiFact and Kaiser Health News — aims to help consumers untangle the half-truths often found in the political discourse relating to health care.”

PolitiFact is the largest political fact-checking news organization in the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. National PolitiFact reporters are based in St. Petersburg and Washington, D.C., while news partnerships expand PolitiFact reporting into 13 states and in Spanish-speaking news markets.

“KFF has a long history of providing trusted information on national health issues. This collaboration brings the knowledge and experience of KHN’s team of journalists together with the established and trusted PolitiFact approach to help the general public, policymakers, and other news organizations sort through the misinformation and disinformation that often permeates political and industry discussions of health policy issues,” said Drew Altman, KFF’s CEO and KHN’s founding publisher.  “We are thrilled to be working with Poynter and PolitiFact on this joint effort.”

About The Poynter Institute:

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a global leader in journalism education and a strategy center that stands for uncompromising excellence in journalism, media and 21st-century public discourse. Poynter faculty teach seminars and workshops at the Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, and at conferences and organizations around the world. Its e-learning division, News University, offers the world’s largest online journalism curriculum, with hundreds of interactive courses and tens of thousands of registered international users. The Institute’s website, poynter.org, produces 24-hour coverage about media, ethics, technology and the business of news. Poynter is the home of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, the International Fact-Checking Network and MediaWise, a teen digital information literacy project. Collectively, this work builds public awareness about journalism, media, the First Amendment and discourse that serves democracy and the public good.

About The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Kaiser Health News:

Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues, KFF (the Kaiser Family Foundation) is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California.  KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. KHN is the nation’s leading and largest health and health policy newsroom, with more than 50 journalists and dozens of freelancers producing stories that run on kffhealthnews.org and that are published by hundreds of news organizations across the country.

Contact

Rakesh Singh

(650) 854-9400

rsingh@kff.org

Tina Dyakon

(727) 553-4343

tdyakon@poynter.org