French ‘fact-checker’ service CheckNews has been announced as the recipient of a $50,000 grant from the International Fact-Checking Network, run by the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute, to be the lastest fact-checking service funded by the left-liberal billionaire.
CheckNews, which was founded by the French centre-left newspaper Libération, was announced by the Poynter Institute as the winner of a $50,000 grant as part of its first-ever “Fact Forward Innovation Fund”, according to the institute’s website.
The French fact-checker was initially rolled out during last year’s French presidential elections and was kept on as a permanent project after it garnered some popularity. The format of the service allows readers to ask questions directly to the fact-checkers who then give detailed responses, and saw thousands of questions submitted during the presidential election.
The funding is expected to help the newspaper expand the fact-checker to other countries, including Tunisia in North Africa, where it was recently tested during local elections.
“Media organizations of many different countries already know how to work together on investigation pieces, like the ones we see with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. We should be able to do the same thing with fact-checking,” said Pauline Moullot, fact-checker and project lead of CheckNews.
The Poynter Insitute, who are behind the fact-checking on social media giant Facebook, lists billionaire left-liberal activist George Soros’s Open Society Foundations as one of its donors. Last year Soros gave Open Society Foundations a cash injection of $18 billion.
Despite its massive reserves of cash, Soros’s foundation has been under constant fire in his native Hungary, and recently announced that it would be abandoning its operations in Budapest and moving to Angela Merkel’s Berlin.
Poynter has also been highlighted by the European Union, which is also looking to set up an “independent fact-checking network”.
The EU Commission announced it would be looking at staffing an “independent” network with members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).
Other fact-checking services in Europe have also been linked to the Hungarian-born billionaire, including the German fact-checker Correctiv, which received €26,884 directly from Open Society Foundations, and another €114,000 from the Dutch Adessium Foundation — which also receives cash from Soros.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com