Ten years ago, the PolitiFact Texas team began rating the truthfulness of statements made by politicians and other prominent people in the news. Madlin Mekelburg, along with founding PolitiFact Texas editor Gardner Selby, say some fact checks, in particular, were very popular with readers.
Fact checks involving former congressman and presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke have been some of the site’s best known stories. One was about O’Rourke’s arrests for two misdemeanors in El Paso: one involving jumping a fence, and another for driving while intoxicated. Those stories centered on what O’Rourke said about those arrests years later.
When President Donald Trump came to Austin in 2019 to tour a plant building computers for Apple, the PolitiFact team rated a tweet from Trump about his role in that plant’s history.
In 2014, a blogger wrote that a Texas death row inmate “requested a live child for his last meal,” Selby says. The debunked claim originated from a Belgian website, Mekelburg says.
Hear how all of PolitiFact’s top fact checks scored in the audio player above.
Written by Shelly Brisbin.
