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Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, will speak on the future and relevance of fact-checking at Middle Tennessee State University on Thursday, Feb. 2.

The event at 11:20 a.m. in the Parliamentary Room at the Student Union Building is part of the Pulitzer Prize Series sponsored by the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies.

Adair is also speaking at 6 p.m. at the First Amendment Center in Nashville as the inaugural event of the new two-year Seigenthaler Series, programs to explore emerging issues involving the media and our most fundamental freedoms. The event at the First Amendment Center (1207 18th Ave. South) will be followed by a reception and mixer with food and drinks.

PolitiFact won a Pulitzer in 2009 in National Reporting for “its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”

Adair, who also is Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism & Public Policy and the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, recently said that fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org continue to have record traffic and reached new levels of prominence during this year’s presidential campaign. However, he said fact-checkers were slow to recognize the “onslaught of fake news” and predicts that 2017 will be “the year of the fact-checking bot.”

David Fallis, deputy investigative editor for The Washington Post, was the Fall 2016 speaker for the Pulitzer Series. Fallis was one of the editors on the Fatal Force project which developed a national database of police shootings.