Louis Jacobson

Chief Correspondent

Louis Jacobson has been with PolitiFact since 2009, currently as chief correspondent. Previously, he served as senior correspondent and deputy editor. Before joining PolitiFact, he worked as a deputy editor of Roll Call and as founding editor of its legislative wire service, CongressNow. Earlier, he spent more than a decade covering politics, policy, Congress and lobbying for National Journal magazine. He is senior author of the 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 editions of The Almanac of American Politics. He also contributed to the 2000 and 2004 editions of the Almanac. Since 2004, Jacobson has been writing a column on politics in the states, which has run in Roll Call, Stateline.org, Governing, and the Cook Political Report. He now divides the column between Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and U.S. News and World Report. Earlier in his career, he wrote on science for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Science magazine. He received the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014, and in 2016 and 2022, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers gave him a Best in Business award for his economics coverage. Jacobson has been teaching at West Virginia University's Reed College of Media since August 2018, showing WVU students how to produce fact-checks for PolitiFact West Virginia. He has also been serving as a visiting scholar at St. Bonaventure University's Jandoli School of Communication since April 2020, teaching students how to produce fact-checks for PolitiFact New York.