FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson to Visit DePauw November 4

October 29, 2004

October 29, 2004, Greencastle, Ind. - In the heat of the current presidential campaign, FactCheck.org has become a household name to many. On Thursday, November 4, veteran journalist Brooks Jackson -- director of FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research operation run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center -- will come to the campus of DePauw University for a Gertrude and G.D. Crain Jr. Lecture. The event, at 4:15 p.m. in Watson Forum of the Eugene S. Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media, is free and open to all.

Brooks Jackson is a journalist who covered Washington and national politics for 34 years, reporting in turn for the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. 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 two books: Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process (Knopf, 1988) and Broken Promise: Why the Federal Election Commission Failed (Twentieth Century Fund: 1990).

FactCheck.org "aims to reduce deception and confusion in American politics by monitoring the accuracy of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases," states Massachusetts' Springfield Republican. The newspaper, in a recent report, notes, "there were 63,000 visits to the site following the first Bush-Kerry debate, and in the 24 hours after Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly referred to the site as FactCheck.com during his October 5 debate with US Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, there were 368,000 visits. Jackson said others tried to get to the site after the Cheney-Edwards debate but could not. 'I can tell you,' Jackson said, 'there's far more interest than we expected, and that's gratifying'" (read more here).

Endowed by Rance Crain, president of Crain Communications and a member of DePauw's Class of 1960, the lecture series, which honors Mr. Crain's parents, was created last spring to enrich the DePauw environment in the area of public affairs and public issues.

Previous Crain Lecturers have included veteran political columnist Jack Germond (read more here); military sociologist Charles Moskos (read more here); historian Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (read more here); David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union (read more here); and Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's presidential campaign (read more here).

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