Three Groups Blazing Revolutionary New Approaches to Factovacy

Everybody has opinions; these non-profits mobilize facts and data to separate the wheat from the chaff for inquiring minds who want to know

It was 1998 when I — then editor of the MontgomeryJournal, a suburban daily in a Maryland county bordering the nation’s capital — was introduced by a young reporter who was covering the local public schools to the then-dawning power of data-based journalism.

Stephanie motioned me over to her desk in the newsroom one morning and showed me an Excel spreadsheet she had compiled. Being a word guy who hates math and miserably failed a freshman college level accounting course, I’d never paid attention to any spreadsheets.

But this one grabbed my curiosity as she explained how she had, on her own initiative, for several months compiled crime reports for each of the high school campuses in the county’s public schools system. She would then enter the data from those reports in her spreadsheet. She was the only one of dozens of journalists covering Montgomery County, including several from the Washington Post and the Washington Times, who bothered to do so.

I said “okay, is there something here you can report as news?” Stephanie responded by tapping on a couple of keys on her keyboard, the spreadsheet data on the screen then whirred and blurred for a second, and, ta-da!, we saw charted the 10 most dangerous schools in Montgomery County, as measured by incidents of multiple serious crimes on various campuses. Instantly I recognized a huge news story because local public education officials never ceased boasting that their system was one of the nation’s finest, safest, and most academically advanced. They expected local reporters to repeat their claims without challenge ad nauseum, something which neither I nor Stephanie were of a mind to do.

But the data didn’t lie, the numbers showed the schools were not immune to the spiraling crime then being experienced across the capital region. Thanks to its sterling reputation, families for years had moved to Montgomery County because of its schools’ supposed safety and excellence. Stephanie’s spreadsheet made clear the county’s emerging crime problem was not just in the streets; it was also in the schools.

Not long afterwards, Stephanie left the paper and, I think, married her Naval Academy graduating suitor, so I lost track of her thereafter. But she opened my eyes that day to the power of data-based journalism and I was hooked. Have been ever since. Learning essential Excel skills became priority number one, greatly assisted in journalism applications by Elliot Jaspin, one of the first data journalists of note and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Elliot and I didn’t agree on much politically, but we both viewed independent journalism and transparency in government as essentials.

About the same time, I met Bill Beach, then Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA), and together in 2000 we launched Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) Boot Camps. Several hundred journalists from both Mainstream Media and conservative media outlets attended the CARR boot camps before the program ended in 2011.

That was a fertile decade because early on, Bill — who would go on to be Director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under President Trump — and I had a vision for putting federal spending data on the Internet so everybody could see where their tax dollars were going.

As it happened, Gary Bass, the founder of the liberal OMB Watch newsletter, shared a similar vision, as did Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). And in September 2006, that shared vision became a reality when then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) that mandated creation of USASpending.gov, the internet web site that makes public most federal spending. This was truly a paradigm shift in government transparency and journalism’s ability to hold public officials accountable.

So, here we are today, nearly three decades later, with pervasive social media, print newspapers all but dying on the vine, replaced by Internet sites that provide nearly instantaneous reporting and opinion about … pretty much everything to hundreds of millions of readers. Plus podcasts, blogs, cable news, livestreaming, etc. etc. But there is a huge problem in the cacophony of voices claiming to be trustworthy. Too many of them from one end of the political spectrum to the other only deliver half-truths, highly selective opinion and research, click-bait, and purposefully misleading and intellectually dishonest narrative “journalism.”

The problem is, as I was asked during a recent question-and-answer session with a bunch of smart men and women who are long-time supporters of Focus on the Family (FOTF), how do you know who in the news media to trust? My answer is to test media claims by subjecting them to fact and data-driven research provided by three of what I call “factovacy” research non-profits that are products of the data-driven Internet reporting revolution.

These three are: Just Facts, led by James Agresti, Open the Books headed by John Hart, and Truth-In-Accounting managed by Sheila Weinberg, CPA. These three individuals and the factovacy work they and their colleagues perform every day put facts first for anybody with an open mind and a willingness to listen. There are, of course, legions of other non-profit advocacy groups that do superb work — think Citizens Against Government Waste on earmarks — but these three offer the most empowerment to inquiring minds.

Just Facts publishes Just Facts Daily (JFD), which regularly addresses one or more questionable claims, statements, assertions by public officials, media figures, talking heads, celebrities, and academic experts, and provides the necessary correctives. Each day, JFD poses a question like this recent one: “What portion of all childbirths in the U.S. are funded by Medicaid? 20 percent. 40 percent. 60 percent.” The correct answer — 40 percent — was given by 52 percent of the respondents, and JFD provides links to additional information such as that provided by National Vital Statistics Reports. Plus observations like this:

“Medicaid is the main government healthcare program for low-income people. In the U.S. during 2023, Medicaid was the source of payment for 41.5% of all childbirths. This varied from 22% for Asian mothers to 28% for white mothers, 59% for Hispanic mothers, 65% for black mothers, and 65% for American Indian mothers.”

For an example of the kind of reportage and analyses enabled by Just Facts Daily, check out this recent one on PJ Media by yours truly. I expect to do a booming bipartisan business based on JFD with this “When Reality Bites” series of columns.

Next is Open the Books, which was founded in 2011 by then-Illinois entrepreneur Adam Adrzejewski, inspired as he was by FFATA and the immense potential gold mine of public access to the facts about federal spending. Adam was an indefatigible advocate for the view that every citizen should be able to access the facts about all government spending. In the years prior to his tragic and unexpected passing in 2024, Open the Books used more than 50,000 federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and its state and local equivalents to obtain and post the largest, most accessible government spending database ever accumulated anywhere in the world. It is “every dime, online, in real time.”

The database includes comprehensive spending data at the federal, state and municipal levels. Countless investigative and data-based straight news stories have been enabled in the years since, including this recent one by this author.

Hart was the logical choice to succeed Adam and he has effectively set about implementing new tools to expand the accessibility, analytical rigor and timeliness of the Open the Books database. Just a few days ago, he announced a huge step forward in that effort, using the analogy provided by a 2011 movie and a joint endeavor with Citizen Portal AI:

“‘Moneyball” tells the story of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane built a winning team on a shoestring budget. He did it not by getting lucky or by inventing new statistics. Instead, he discovered patterns in data that others had overlooked. He identified what really correlated with success (and failure) … We're going to combine Open the Books' unmatched spending database with AI tools to help citizens spot patterns, predict waste, and call out corruption faster than ever before.”

Having experienced how Excel can make data come alive, as well as how AI can do so at speeds and depths never before available, I have little doubt that Open the Books in the days ahead is going to empower factovacy like never before. Somewhere in Heaven, Tom Coburn is grinning ear-to-ear and saying “I told you so!”

Which now brings us to Truth-In-Accounting. Considering my previously noted “success” in collegiate accounting education, one might not expect to see included in this selection a factovacy non-profit devoted specifically and systematically to reforming the accounting standards issued by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) that govern how officials account for their spending. The reality is that government does not abide in its own reporting by the same accounting standards it requires of corporations and private sector businesses. The result is the reality that much of what passes as accounting by governments is little more than fiction-by-the-numbers.

As Weinberg recently told this journo:

“The single most needed reform of the GASB is to make the board truly independent. Too many members come from government or government-affiliated organizations that have a direct stake in how financial results are presented, which can influence the standards that are set. As a result, the current structure produces rules that do not give citizens clear, useful information about government finances, including what policies are sustainable or how to evaluate elected officials,” Weinberg told The Washington Stand.

“Governments are able to claim balanced budgets under modified accrual accounting for budgeted funds while excluding major long-term obligations such as unfunded pensions and treating borrowing as revenue, which materially distorts fiscal reality. At the same time, most deferred inflows and outflows, which are not true assets or liabilities but represent amounts pushed into future periods, distort governments’ current net position, revenues, and expenses and can even place investment losses on the asset side of the balance sheet, masking the true financial condition of government.”

Check out the Truth-In-Accounting web site, where you will find these gems: “The Pension Time Bomb,” “Financial Transparency Scorecard 2026,” and “The Financial State of the Union 2026.” And if you really want to get data geeky, you will want to spend some time on Truth-In-Accounting’s “Data Z” database product that enables you to create superb charts and graphs of spending on an endless sequence of issues and topics at the state and municipal levels. Oh, how I wish I had Data Z at the Montgomery Journal!

I entered journalism in 1985 after six years with President Ronald Reagan and before that four working on Capitol Hill. I love journalism and the fabled newsrooms of old that when I entered the profession were becoming little more than fond-but-fading memories. I remain an old-school journalist, however, who learned early on from mentor Wes Pruden that real reporting requires you to “get it first, but first get right.”

Despite the depths to which the MSM has sunk in recent years, I remain an optimist who believes, sooner or later, a new golden age of old-school journalism is possible, thanks to the emergence of data-driven investigative journalism, factovacy groups like the tremendous trio herein discussed, the ease of entry on the Internet, and the emerging revival of Christian faith in this country, particularly among Gen-Zers, with the concurrent resurgence of assent to the reality of absolute truth.