Watch List: Bill Adair

Many people hear a politician’s bold assertion and wonder if it’s true. Journalist and incoming Duke professor Bill Adair takes that question and finds the answers.

Adair will join Duke’s faculty this Fall as the Knight Professor of Computational Journalism, but he’s been serving as the Washington Bureau Chief for The Tampa Bay Times since 2004. Adair covered the White House in the early 2000s, but realized afterward that he wished he had done more fact-checking in his coverage. Before the 2008 election, he decided to focus on precisely that—he created PolitiFact, a web journalism outfit that hones in on specific statements by politicians and evaluates them on a Truth-O-Meter scale from “True” down to “Pants On Fire.”

“From the start, what has distinguished it from other fact-checking is it is truly webby,” Adair said. “It is a new form of journalism that no longer relies on the inverted pyramid and the simplicity of the print construct.”

Since its launch in August 2007, PolitiFact has won a Pulitzer Prize and expanded to include 10 state-level sites that are licensed with other news organizations, as well as a recently launched Australia branch. 

Adair will teach two courses this Fall—News as a Moral Battleground, a Public Policy class focusing on the ethics of reporting with unattributed sources, and The Press and the Presidency, a Policy Journalism and Media Studies course which will examine the close yet at times combative relationship between the press corps and the White House. 

Adair’s role as Knight Chair also includes a research component, to which he will be able to apply the entrepreneurial, web-first spirit that drove PolitiFact’s creation. Newspapers and TV stations still tell stories the way they have for years, he said, so as Knight Chair he plans to research new forms of journalism that harness the power of technology to tell stories.

“We are at a moment in human history where we can reinvent journalism, and the great thing about being a Knight professor is that you have a platform that you can use to build new things and to experiment,” Adair said.

And will there be a role for students to get involved in this digital experimentation?