FactCheck.org : About Us
About Us
Our MissionWe are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.
factcheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.
Our Funding
Prior to fiscal 2010, we were supported entirely by three sources: funds from the APPC’s own resources (specifically an endowment created in 1993 by the Annenberg Foundation at the direction of the late Walter Annenberg, and a 1995 grant by the Annenberg Foundation to fund APPC’s Washington, D.C., base); additional funds from the Annenberg Foundation; and grants from the Flora Family Foundation. We do not seek and have never accepted, directly or indirectly, any funds from corporations, unions, partisan organizations or advocacy groups.
In 2010, we began accepting donations from individual members of the public for the first time, responding to many unsolicited offers of support from our subscribers. We launched our first public appeal for donations in April 2010.
At that time we also decided to disclose our finances in greater detail, so that our readers may judge for themselves whether or not any of those individual donations could influence us.
Our policy is to disclose the identity of any individual donor giving $1,000 or more. We also disclose the total amount, average amount and number of individual donations.
Note: In addition to the sums reported here, factcheck.org receives in-kind support from the Annenberg Public Policy Center including office space, utilities and technical support from APPC staff, and salary for one election-year staff employee. We do not attempt to assign a dollar value to these in-kind services, which are funded from the APPC’s own resources.