FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels. Prior to fiscal 2010, we were supported entirely by three sources: funds from the APPC’s own resources (specifically an endowment created in 1993 by the Annenberg Foundation at the direction of the late Walter Annenberg, and a 1995 grant by the Annenberg Foundation to fund APPC’s Washington, D.C., base); additional funds from the Annenberg Foundation; and grants from the Flora Family Foundation. We do not seek and have never accepted, directly or indirectly, any funds from corporations, unions, partisan organizations or advocacy groups. At that time we also decided to disclose our finances in greater detail, so that our readers may judge for themselves whether or not any of those individual donations could influence us. Note: In addition to the sums reported here, FactCheck.org receives in-kind support from the Annenberg Public Policy Center including office space, utilities and technical support from APPC staff. We do not attempt to assign a dollar value to these in-kind services, which are funded from the APPC’s own resources. Brooks Jackson is a journalist who has covered Washington and national politics since 1970, reporting in turn for the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. He joined the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2003 and launched FactCheck.org in December of that year. At CNN, he pioneered the “adwatch” and “factcheck” form of stories debunking false and misleading political statements, starting with the presidential election of 1992. His investigative reporting for the AP and the Journal won several national awards. He is the author of three books: “Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process” (Knopf, 1988); “Broken Promise: Why the Federal Election Commission Failed” (Twentieth Century Fund, 1990); and “unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation” with Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Random House, 2007). Eugene Kiely is a journalist who has covered government and politics for more than 20 years. Prior to joining FactCheck.org, Kiely was a Washington assignment editor at USA TODAY , leading a team of reporters who focused on Congress, politics and government accountability. Previously, he worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer , starting as a statehouse reporter in Trenton, N.J., and rising to become the Pennsylvania state editor. At the Inquirer , Kiely coordinated coverage of the Amish schoolhouse shooting, honored with a 2007 Sigma Delta Chi award for breaking news. He also worked at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., where he served as the statehouse bureau chief in Trenton. He was the editor of “Open for Business,” a series on then-Gov. Christie Whitman’s environmental policies that won the 1996 John Oakes award. Kiely studied at Livingston College at Rutgers University, majoring in journalism and English. Lori Robertson is a journalist who covered the media for nine years as an editor and writer for American Journalism Review , a bimonthly media watchdog magazine. At AJR, she won the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism and an honorable mention in the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award. Previously, she was the administrative director of the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families, a resource center for journalists covering at-risk kids. She has written for various publications as a freelancer and is a 1993 graduate of Duquesne University with a B.A. in advertising. A journalist for more than 23 years, Robert Farley was most recently a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times for more than 13 years. In early 2008, Farley joined PolitiFact.com, a political fact-checking website created by the St. Petersburg Times , and he was part of the team