Hearst Stations Renew PolitiFact Partnership

Hearst Television Inc. today announced it renewed its “successful alliance” with PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website of the Tampa Bay Times.

Hearst said its election-year alliance with PolitiFact, “launched in January 2012 and marking the first such national partnership between the fact-checking organization and a major TV station group, resulted in weekly fact-checking reports throughout the Hearst station group — in addition to regular local fact-checking segments independent of the PolitiFact partnership.”

In one recurring feature of the exclusive partnership, Hearst Television’s Washington, D.C., bureau produced segments on PolitiFact’s fact-checking about the presidential campaign using the website’s much-discussed “Truth-O-Meter.”

Additionally, Hearst said it is launching a series of statewide town hall discussions, called “Leaders Listen,” throughout New Hampshire. The events will feature New Hampshire politicians at all levels and will be live-streamed on its WMUR.com and subsequently covered on WMUR Manchester. N.H. (Boston) newscasts. This series of off-election-year town halls unprecedented in New England politics is designed to let elected officials answer voters’ questions. Separately, WMUR.com political director James Pindell will provide “Watching Washington” reports, focusing on New Hampshire’s congressional delegation, every Thursday during the 5 p.m. news hour.

“Conventional wisdom may hold that television stations relax political news coverage during non-election years, but the reality is different,” said David Barrett, chairman-CEO of Hearst Television. “Increasingly, politics never sleeps, and television broadcasters do an outstanding job covering the issues year-in and year-out. These latest efforts reflect our own continuing commitment to ensure that legislators and regulators whose decisions impact our communities will get a forum, and that their statements and activities will receive the analysis they warrant.”

PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair said: “The need to hold politicians accountable doesn’t end with election day, so we’re thrilled to extend our partnership with Hearst in 2013. Our Truth-O-Meter fact-checking is as important when politicians are governing as it is when they are campaigning.”

The 2013 efforts come on the heels of Hearst’s presidential election-year Commitment 2012, a project encompassing the company’s 25 news-producing TV stations, and their respective local websites and mobile sites, resulting in, among other accomplishments:

• 250 hours of political coverage during the year.

• 69 debates and political specials.

• An Election 2012 app that by election day reached not only No. 1 among all iTunes free news apps, but No. 2 among free iPhone apps overall — surpassing those from CNN, The New York Times, Fox News and the candidates’ own apps.

• Four major political investigations on these topics:
  • The state of Medicare.
  • The impact of increased lobbying by tech giants including Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
  • A comparison of job-creation legislative proposals vs. those actually debated and brought to a vote.
  • The impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on the election-year discourse.

• Hearst Television’s seventh consecutive group-wide Walter Cronkite Award, announced March 5, bestowed by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for excellence in television political journalism.