We bring truthiness to ‘The Colbert Report’

PolitiFact brought some truthiness to The Colbert Report on Wednesday night, as PolitiFact editor Bill Adair appeared on the show with Jake Tapper, interim host of ABC’s This Week, to explain our fact-checking of the show.

Colbert didn’t understand all the fuss about fact-checking and he’s convinced that our parent, the St. Petersburg Times, is Russian.

To get a taste of the Truth-O-Meter, the Colbert producers asked us to fact-check a few claims from Monday’s show. Bill didn’t get a chance to discuss them on the show, but you can find them on our home page. We checked:

• Jeffrey Toobin’s claim that a filibuster has not been used successfully against a Supreme Court justice.
• A claim from Julian Assange that the WikiLeaks video shows the soldiers were given authority to fire before “RPGs” were mentioned.
• Colbert’s claim that John Paul Stevens is the last Protestant on the Supreme Court.

If you missed the show, you can watch it online on the Colbert Web site.

We’ll update this story with more about the show later today.