Poynter’s PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking newsroom, has unveiled a new experiment in Spanish, PolitiFact in Spanish (www. politifact. com/espanol), for more than 40 million Spanish speakers in the United States to discover the truth. In politics.
A new Spanish-language online page and related social media presence are the culmination of an effort that began in 2023 when PolitiFact introduced a Spanish-language team. The team’s fact checks appeared on the pages of PolitiFact’s existing online page and across Telemundo stations in Florida through a partnership that brings fact checks to stations’ newscasts and virtual and streaming platforms .
“We are excited to take this next step to better serve millions of people in the United States who consume news primarily in Spanish,” said PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders. Deputy Editor Miriam Valverde, who initiated fact-checking programs on immigration for PolitiFact in 2016, runs PolitiFact en Spanish and its team of Spanish-speaking journalists.
“Our new online page and social media presence will provide Spanish speakers with factual information and help protect them from harmful misdata that is prevalent across all platforms,” Valverde said.
The release includes fact-checking through the PolitiFact en Español team, which weeds out Spanish-language misinformation in its vast bureaucracy and writes in-depth articles and fact-checks. Much of the fact-checking falls under Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, which debunks misinformation on Instagram and Facebook. The team also translates fact checks and current articles from English to Spanish and vice versa.
Valverde said the idea is not only to copy PolitiFact. com the Spanish, but also to find tactics to better serve the target audience. To that end, the effort included launching a WhatsApp suggestion line to solicit concepts from readers, as well as a WhatsApp channel. PolitiFact en Spanish is also active on TikTok and Instagram. With the 2024 U. S. presidential election coming up later this year and the Hispanic electorate as a demographic coveted by both parties, there will be no shortage of political claims to verify, Sanders said.
“It is especially vital that PolitiFact en Spanish be a resource for Spanish-speaking voters, who will be bombarded with political messages, many of them false, during election season,” he said.
Other partnerships come with Factchequeado, a fact-checking organization that stores PolitiFact paintings with their netpaintings, which come with Hispanic media outlets. PolitiFact is also partnering with Telemundo and Florida-based NBCUniversal to bring its fact-checking to broadcast news and the stations’ digital, cellular and streaming platforms. A recent Poynter survey of Hispanics in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina found that local Hispanic citizens rely primarily on social media for news, followed through television and websites: “Poor translation, along underrepresented, creates barriers to data and can lead to distrust among Hispanics toward English-language news organizations.
Regarding translation, interviewees lamented the lack of attempts to translate local data into Spanish. When translated, translations are sensationalist and inaccurate. As one respondent summarized, “The U. S. media does little to address the realities that have effects on Hispanic families. There is not enough translation and unfortunately many attempts lack quality because they translate very badly and I find myself misinformed. »