FactCheck.org’s deputy managing editor, Robert Farley, has been awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2023 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Fact Checking for a series of articles on claims made during the House investigation and impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden. The award recognizes excellence in journalism, and FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, joins a list of honorees that includes CBS News, Bloomberg, STAT News, Voice of America, and Univision.
The award-winning stories ran during the summer and fall of 2023 and focus on the impeachment inquiry, which concerns Republican claims that Biden benefited from or assisted with his son Hunter’s business dealings with entities in other countries while Biden was vice president. In three articles, Farley found that, so far, Republicans have not been able to establish that Biden was involved in these business dealings, that he directly benefited from them, or that he used his position as vice president to assist his family’s companies.
The stories are:
- “Republicans Oversell Archer’s Testimony About Hunter and Joe Biden,” Aug. 14, 2023
- “Cherry-Picking ‘Influence’ Payment from James to Joe Biden,” Oct. 26, 2023
- “GOP Misleading Claims in Biden Impeachment Investigation,” Dec. 14, 2023
Judges called the articles “a fine, resonant job of fact checking and reality checking the Biden impeachment inquiry.” See the Sigma Delta Chi video’s reference to this award.
This is FactCheck.org’s fourth Sigma Delta Chi Award, and its third in the five years since the fact-checking category was created. FactCheck.org previously won Sigma Delta Chi Awards in Fact Checking for “Trump on the Stump,” an Oct. 22, 2020, story about 46 of the false or misleading claims made by President Donald Trump over a five-day period prior to the 2020 election, and for “Trump’s Steel Industry Claims,” on Aug 29, 2019. FactCheck.org won a Sigma Delta Chi Award in 2010 for non-deadline reporting by independent news sites for a package of five articles on deceptive claims about federal health care legislation.
A longtime journalist, Farley joined FactCheck.org as deputy managing editor in August 2011 after more than 13 years as a reporter at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, now the Tampa Bay Times. In 2008, he joined PolitiFact.com (now PolitiFact), a political fact-checking website created by the St. Petersburg Times, where he was part of the team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
