Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, will deliver the Henry and Bryna David Lecture at the National Academy of Sciences on April 28. Jamieson will discuss science communication, including examples of outstanding and problematic communication.

Television station KUSA in Denver, Colo., has won the 2015 Cronkite/Jackson Prize for Fact Checking Political Messages, named for the founding director of FactCheck.org, Brooks Jackson. The fact-checking award was selected by a jury convened by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, home of FactCheck.org.

Annenberg Classroom’s That’s Your Right game has been named a finalist for a 2015 Games for Change Award. The game, a single- or multiplayer digital card game that teaches students about the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was named one of the three finalists for Best Gameplay.

The political spin that so often is attached to discussions surrounding public policy and science is the focus of the March 2015 issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Politics and science often intermix on matters including climate change, vaccinations, fracking, nuclear power, evolution, genetically modified organisms, and stem cell research, among others.

In Quarterly Journal of Speech, Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes: "After arguing that our disciplinary origins and aptitudes equip us to understand the practice and potential of political debate, this essay will synthesize briefly some of the contributions our scholarship has made to understanding televised presidential debates..."

Climate scientists inadvertently support the idea that they are partisans when they do not account for "inconvenient evidence," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, told scientists and journalists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, Calif. Jamieson also said flawed studies must be retracted much more quickly.

FactCheck.org, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, has introduced a new feature, "SciCheck," to investigate science-based claims in political speech. In a blog post announcing the feature, Eugene Kiely, the director of FactCheck.org, said SciCheck "will focus exclusively on false and misleading scientific claims that are made by partisans to influence public policy."

Peggy Charren, a major force in improving children's television -- and a grassroots activist whose work was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as the inaugural Annenberg Public Policy Center award for distinguished lifetime contribution to children's television -- died Jan. 22 at her home outside Boston.

Since President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday, FactCheck.org’s posts checking claims in the speech and the GOP responses have been republished on sites across the web and shared thousands of times on social media.

Pollster Peter Hart conducted a focus group with a dozen voters in Aurora, Col., on Jan. 8 for the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Hart, director of APPC's "Voices of the Voters," convened the group just as a new, Republican-controlled Congress takes office and as candidates start emerging for the 2016 election.