 "Poynter removes Firstpost from list of 515 websites spreading 'false or misleading' information, issues clarification about error")
On Tuesday, Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published a list of over 500 websites “that repeatedly spread false or misleading information”. Among the websites named on the list, titled ‘UnNews: An index of unreliable news websites’, was Firstpost. A day later, Poynter removed Firstpost from the list and published a statement noting, “This index previously listed The Washington Examiner and Firstpost as unreliable news sources. After reviewing our methodology, we found that neither met the criteria for inclusion, so both were removed.” Philip Klein, executive editor of The Washington Examiner, took to Twitter to acknowledge Poynter’s statement, and stated:
So what happened? Poynter combined findings by a group of fact-checking websites — FactCheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, PolitiFact and Snopes — to classify websites according to the whether they fell under the following categories: bias, conspiracy, clickbait, fake, satire, unreliable.
According to PolitiFact, Firstpost merited being on the list because it carried “some fake stories”, while the ‘UnNews’ index tagged Firstpost tagged as “unreliable”. The problem PolitiFact classified Firstpost as carrying “some fake stories” based on its research up until 9 November, 2017. It may be recalled that on the date, satire website Faking News was hosted on the firstpost.com domain — something PolitiFact failed to disambiguate. Note: On the Poynter list, Faking News also gets a separate mention, classified as ‘fake’ and ‘satire’ by OpenSources. Elsewhere, British magazine Private Eye, American group blog Daily Kos and the aforementioned The Washington Examiner also found themselves on this list for fairly specious reasons. Twitter users hit out at IFCN for adding Private Eye, in particular, to the list, with one user asking , “Have they actually read [Private Eye] Have they really mistaken the satire as supposedly factual? Who do they employ to do their research for them?” and another tweeting , “Could you pls remove [Private Eye] asap? It’s a respected UK publication doing serious investigative work.” Setting the record straight Firstpost wrote to Poynter and PolitiFact to address its erroneous inclusion on the ‘UnNews’ list, and sent out a series of tweets to address the issue. And while Poynter responded by removing Firstpost from the list and issuing a statement, along with a section marked ‘Corrections’ on the ‘UnNews’ list website, PolitiFact has yet to respond. This article will be updated when the fact-checking site does so.