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The press must be held accountable. Can you support independent fact checking?
In the middle of a pandemic, good information is vital.
But with our own newspapers confusing the facts, it can be hard to tell what’s true and what’s not. Can you help make sure the public get the accuracy they deserve?
Over the past two weeks, we’ve secured corrections from the BBC, the Guardian, HuffPost, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Metro. Two MPs also agreed to delete a falsely attributed quote on Twitter.
Uncertain times are ahead. As bad information about the coronavirus continues to surge, we need your support today.
Just a few pounds a month helps ensure harmful false errors are spotted and called out.
If you agree that good information saves lives, can we count on you today?
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FACT CHECK
Gavin Williamson was widely misquoted as having said that the danger of basing pupils’ grades solely on teacher assessments is that they “will be overpromoted into jobs that are beyond their competence.”
This can be traced back to a tweet by financial journalist Philip Coggan, who was reacting to an article written by the Education Secretary in the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Williamson’s comments actually suggested that students’ grades would be seen as devalued by potential future employers.
Coggan later emphasised that his tweet was “a joke.” Unfortunately, many people didn’t get it.
The fake quote was shared by journalists Piers Morgan, John Crace and Adam Boulton, actor David Schneider, Labour MP Toby Perkins and Labour peer Lord Andrew Adonis. It was also reported or featured in the Guardian, HuffPost and the Indy100.
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FACT CHECK
A Facebook post shared more than 6,000 times wrongly claimed that the government’s “£300m track and trace app has quietly been binned.”
The cost of the app is actually about £10.8 million so far and, although the app has not been released to the wider public yet, trials of it are ongoing at the time of writing.
Due to problems with the original design, the government changed direction with the app, and is now developing a solution created by Google and Apple.
Media reports that the government either performed a U-turn or abandoned its previous form are not necessarily wrong—but claiming that the app has been “quietly binned” is not correct.
As for the £300 million figure: there’s no evidence for this. So where did it come from? The confusion may have arisen from the fact that in May, the government announced a £300 million funding package for local authorities to support test and trace services in general across England. But the app is only one part of the wider test and trace effort.
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FACT CHECK
Also this week...
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