By Cory Haik, The Washington Post's Executive Producer for Digital News

In August 2011, Michele Bachmann held a small rally in the parking lot of a sports bar in Indianola, Iowa with a few dozen people. Over the course of the event, Bachmann, like many politicians, repeatedly misled her audience. The Post’s National Political Editor, Steven Ginsberg, was at the event and detected a problem: no one attending seemed to realize they were being misled. From that moment, the Post set out to try to fix that problem and to give the public the information it needs at the moment it needs it.

Our solution is Truth Teller, which aims to fact check speeches in as close to real time as possible. Truth Teller is a prototype of a news application built by the Post with funding from Knight Foundation's Prototype Fund. The prototype, built in three months, is a big step toward real-time fact checking.

The Post is dedicated to this project because we believe strongly that informing and educating the public is one of the most critical missions we can perform, particularly when it comes to our elected officials - regardless of their political affiliation. Amid the cacophony of an instant-news culture, identifying the truth is both harder and more important than ever. Facts themselves are increasingly under attack and falsehoods can easily and instantly find their way to a mass audience. In fact, many are designed to.