The Poynter Institute is a non-profit training organisation for journalism that has evolved from the Modern Media Institute, which was originally founded by the journalist, Nelson Poynter, in 1975. It owns the Times Publishing Company located in Tampa Bay, Florida, USA, which publishes the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times.

In 2007 the St. Petersburg Times launched PolitiFact, a fact-checking initiative aimed at American politics. PolitiFact has received funding from the Ford Foundation, a charitable organisation initially created by the Ford family to help it retain ownership of the Ford Motor Company in 1936, and the Democracy Fund, founded in 2014 by former eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar. The Democracy Fund has donated over $1,000,000 to PolitiFact. The Poynter Institute took over the operation of PolitiFact in 2018 to increase its access to further charitable donations.

PolitiFact is considered controversial in American political life. In 2009 it won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 presidential election in which they rated the then Senator Barrack Obama’s promise regarding health care plans as ‘True’, only to regrade it as ‘Half-True’ in 2010. This assessment was changed again in 2013, to ‘Lie of the Year’.

In 2019 the Poyntner Institue launched its ‘UnNews’ list of over 500 websites it deemed to be unreliable sources of news. Within a few days the list was removed and replaced with an apology that cited a failure on the part of the Poyntner Institute to validate data received from other journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers.

The International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) was launched by the Poyntner Institue in 2015. Its stated purpose is to promote fact-checking in journalism and to this end it created the IFCN Codes and Principles. The IFCN actively reviews fact-checkers for compliance with its code, issuing an annual certification after audit. Google and Facebook, amongst others, use the IFCN’s certification as a required qualification for fact-checkers. Sponsorship of this kind lends weight to the assumed authority of the IFCN in the world of fact-checking. The IFCN does not appear to be open to external evaluation itself, however.

I have received notifications from Facebook that ‘independent fact-checkers’ have reviewed a post I have either made or shared from another source, but this is misleading in itself. Further down the notice it also clearly states that the decision has come specifically from the ‘International Fact-Checking Network’. The IFCN is not independent, it is owned by the Poyntner Institute. Both are funded by donations received from benefactors with a left of centre political bias. All of the notifications that I have received from Facebook have been in relation to posts that concern the Covid-19 vaccines. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s stated aim on this issue is ‘to advance public goods for global health through technological innovation by accelerating the development and commercialization of novel vaccines and the sustainable manufacture of existing vaccines’. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated money to the Poyntner Institute. The purpose of this donation is ‘to improve the accuracy in worldwide media of claims related to global health and development’. As previously stated, the IFCN is not independent, it is owned by the Poyntner Institute and, like PolitiFact, it reflects the agenda of its major financial supporters.

There is no such thing as an independent fact-checker; everyone has an agenda. The IFCN is not a regulated statutory authority, it is privately owned and charges customers for its accreditation process; it is business, pure and simple!