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How does PolitiFact Georgia’s Truth-O-Meter work?
Our goal is to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution fact-check statements by local, state and national political leaders, including lobbyists and interest groups. We then rate them on the AJC Truth-O-Meter.
To fact-check a claim, reporters first contact the speaker to verify the statement. Next, the research begins. Reporters consult a variety of sources, including industry and academic experts. This research can take hours or a few days or even longer, depending on the claim. Reporters then compile the research into story form and include a recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling.
The fact check then moves on to a panel of veteran editors who debate the statement and the reporter’s recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling. The panel votes on a final ruling; majority prevails.
It’s Fourth of July weekend, and so, of course, there have got to be a few fireworks. Our fact-checkers dissected claims this week by presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and about rival Jeb Bush.
Are American schools more segregated now than they were in the 1960s, as she claimed?
Did Jeb Bush appoint a guardian for the fetus of a rape survivor, as a Facebook post suggests?
The Truth-O-Meter also looked at claims growing out of national conversations related to the church shooting in Charleston, S.C. on June 17th, specifically:
— there are only five states without hate crime laws;
— Amazon has removed “an educational game about Gettysburg;”
Abbreviated versions of our fact checks are below.
Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com/georgia/
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Only five states, including Georgia, do not have a hate crimes law.
— Various media reports on Thursday, June 18th, 2015 in church shooting aftermath
The U.S. Justice Department is weighing whether to bring a federal hate crimes charge in the June 17 church massacre in Charleston. The announcement put the spotlight on the lack of a state-level law in South Carolina, as well as in a handful of other states.
News media outlets, including Newsweek, and National Public Radio, have reported that South Carolina and Georgia are are among only five states without a hate crimes law.
PolitiFact Georgia decided to dig deeper into the claim.
We confirmed that the five states are: South Carolina, Arkansas, Wyoming, Indiana and Georgia.
The Peach State is unique among the five states in that it passed a hate crimes law in 2000. That law was thrown out by the state Supreme Court as “unconstitutionally vague” in 2004
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, has tried unsuccessfully since then to get new hate crime legislation passed that addresses the Supreme Court’s concerns. He said he hopes to have more success next year, with momentum created by the South Carolina church shootings.
Authorities early on said they suspected the June 17 shootings of nine members of at historically black Emanuel A.M.E. Church was a hate crime. The Justice Department opened a hate crimes investigation in the absence of a state law in South Carolina.
We rated the claim that only five states don’t have a hate crimes law True.
Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2014 in a speech in Florissant, Mo.
American schools are “more segregated than they were in the 1960s.”
Speaking at a black church near Ferguson, Mo., Hillary Clinton applauded efforts to remove Confederate flags before challenging America to own up to its racist past and confront “hard truths” about present bigotry.
The shooting in Charleston, S.C., was no isolated incident, but an extreme manifestation of institutionalized racism, she said.
“The truth is equality, opportunity, civil rights in America are still far from where they need to be,” Clinton said on June 23. “Our schools are still segregated, in fact, more segregated than they were in the 1960s.”
The Supreme Court declared segregation “inherently unequal” and unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Sixty years later, have we really regressed and re-segregated?
The Clinton campaign pointed us to a passage in a 2014 study by UCLA Graduate School of Education’s Civil Rights Project that tracked the amount of southern black students attending white schools in the South. By that yardstick, schools are slightly less integrated now than they were in 1968.
Overall, experts say and the data shows that the United States has taken two steps forward and one step back, but hasn’t quite reverted to pre-Civil Rights levels of segregation. Clinton would have been more accurate setting her time frame a little later.
But she has a strong point that the country has fallen back from the high levels of diversity that existed from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
On the whole, we rate her statement Mostly True.
Ultraviolet on Monday, June 15th, 2015 in a Facebook post
Says Jeb Bush “appointed a guardian for the fetus of a rape survivor.”
A political group has highlighted a controversial fight over fetal rights that former Gov. Jeb Bush mounted years ago, but it went too far in its description of what the current presidential candidate did.
Ultraviolet, a women’s rights group, posted an image on Facebook on June 15, 2015, with the title “5 things you should know about Jeb Bush.” The first item read, “Appointed a guardian for the fetus of a rape survivor.”
We checked into all five of the claims listed on the image and found this one was not accurate. (Read our story on the rest here.)
Ultraviolet said Bush “appointed a guardian for the fetus of a rape survivor.”
Bush asked a judge in 2003 to name someone to act in the interests of the fetus of a mentally disabled woman raped in a group home. But the judge did not, because state law does not give a fetus the same protections as a person. An appeals court upheld the judge’s compliance with a 1989 Florida Supreme Court ruling.
To be clear, Bush did not appoint anyone as a representative for the fetus, but he did want one. We rate the statement Mostly False.
Newt Gingrich on Sunday, June 28th, 2015 in comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press”
Says Amazon has removed “an educational game about Gettysburg.”
Businesses, like government, are reacting to calls to remove the Confederate battle flag. Walmart announced June 22 that it would stop selling items with the flag. Major retailers quickly followed suit, including giants like Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Etsy, Sears and Target.
But some say business has gone too far.
Newt Gingrich voiced his displeasure on Meet the Press June 28.
Gingrich criticized Amazon for removing “an educational game about Gettysburg, which is used widely in schools to teach people to think.”
From what PunditFact could find, it appears Amazon did initially remove several board games that depicted the flag, but on the day that Gingrich made the statement, all those games had been restored.
Gingrich’s claim is partially accurate, but also a bit out of date.
We rated it Half True.
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