(Credit: FlackCheck)

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center started a website called Flackcheck.org to “fact check political ads and political journalism,” the Washington Post reported.

According to the Washington Post, the center’s director Kathleen Hall Jamieson “describes Flackcheck as a playful sibling to the serious Factcheck,” a nine-year-old website that was created to fill the void in news fact checking.

Flackcheck’s site describes its mission as using “parody and humor to debunk false political advertising, poke fun at extreme language, and hold the media accountable for their reporting on political campaigns.”

“The idea is to use digital dazzle, games and humor to hook people into questioning the political information they consume and encourage them to read journalism from serious news sources,” according to the Washington Post.

For example, a section of the site “Worst Political ads of 2012” includes videos criticizing a “pro-Gingrich” political ad against Mitt Romney for “deceptive editing.”  (See that video here.) Another FlackCheck video criticizes a pro-Obama ad for using old PolitiFact fact check ruling instead of a “present PolitiFact assessment.”