Jennifer Ernst was stunned when Vice President Dick Cheney misspoke the name of her workplace in front of 43.6 million viewers at the vice presidential debate earlier this month.
Ernst, who graduated from AU with a bachelor's degree in political science last May, has worked as a researcher for the campaign watchdog site Factcheck.org since June.
"We were all pretty shocked and disappointed that this was our big mention and he messed it up," Ernst said.
Within an hour of its mention, more than 50,000 people logged on to < href="http://www.factcheck.com >www.factcheck.com, the Web site of a company that sells domain names and Internet services. The site couldn't handle the heavy traffic, so it diverted users to www.georgesoros.com, an anti-Bush administration site.
The mix-up brought attention to factcheck.org nonetheless.
"We got a lot of press out of it," Ernst said. "Our number of visitors skyrocketed."
Factcheck.org is the Web site for the Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonpartisan group that checks the accuracy of what American political figures say.
The University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center created the site last December specifically to follow the presidential election. Before the surge in the site's publicity, the Center had planned to close the site after the election was over.
Now the site plans to continue to debunk spin in congressional campaigns and political speeches. "The mission [of the site] has to be revamped, but the good news is that we'll still be here," Ernst said.
She has seen her work published in a number of high-profile media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Associated Press.
During the last presidential debate Oct. 13, President Bush said that his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, voted to raise taxes 98 times. By poring over long lists of Senate votes, Ernst found that 43 of them were to set budget targets, which would not have legislated any tax changes. The 98 votes Bush cited also counted several votes on the same bill for basic procedural motions.
"Major news organizations cite factcheck.org and know that I was the one who went through all those votes to figure out how Bush distorted Kerry's record on 'raising' taxes," Ernst said. "It was incredibly rewarding to see how widely my research was used by major papers."
Ernst said the Web site is important in a political climate where sound bytes dominate limited voter attention spans.
"We live in a very fast-paced information age," she said. "In short 30-second spots, you can't get across a lot of information. They're not the truth, but they resonate with voters."
Politicians from all parties are tempted to bend the facts in their own favor, she added.
"There are cases where both [political parties] are right but the whole truth is misrepresented," Ernst said. "You can take statistics and turn them around, and it's confusing for voters."
One of her former professors, Leonard Steinhorn of the School of Communication, said the site is important because it provides citizens a defense against bias. "In any culture of salesmanship, we have to empower people to decode spin," he said.
Steinhorn said he remembers Ernst as a bright, thoughtful student who "loved to get to the nitty-gritty of the issues."
Ernst points to Steinhorn and her thesis advisor, School of Public Affairs Dean William LeoGrande, as her biggest influences at AU.
She said of Steinhorn that "everything he taught is relevant to what I do." LeoGrande helped her reach out to policymakers as sources of information for her thesis, Ernst said.
Ernst, who plans to work for factcheck.org as long as the site exists, said her job now is very much like what students do in college.
"I really love research. I love that I get to keep learning," she said. "It's a lot like what I was doing at AU. Everything you do at AU is practice for what you do in research"
