Fact-checking changed journalism. Then the falsehoods changed, too.

Twenty years after PolitiFact launched, fact-checkers face an information environment more chaotic than the one they set out to fix

PolitiFact started out of discontent with our own field of political journalism. We thought journalists parroted far too many talking points and messages they knew were not true, primarily out of deference to authority.

It was a time after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when there was more deference to the government and official statements, but the problem went back decades, to the bare-knuckled political campaigns and misleading TV commercials of the 1980s. There was too much horse race coverage in political journalism and not enough accountability.