We are living in a world obsessed with facts and information. This information is accessible to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Through the Internet and Google, we can read, process, praise, check and question online within seconds just by pushing the “send” or “post” button. The message is instantly read by millions.
And over the last half decade, developing mobile phone technology has enabled citizens to become ground-level reporters, giving rise to so-called “citizen journalism” – members of the public playing an active role in collecting and spreading news information.
Checking Facts: From Back-Office to World Wide Web
What the people want is the truth, and now. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can become a fact-checker. What used to be a done in quiet back-offices and hidden in the back pages of newspapers in the form of readers’ letters, is now done on a vast public forum.
False facts, misspelled names, wrong dates or even typos can be picked up by the online community and immediately communicated through social media, blogs and forums and to newspaper or magazine editors.
The public’s involvement in news and events and politics and, through the Internet, the wide range of sources from which information can be found, means that the press is now forced to engage with the public. Journalists posting blogs or articles online must arm themselves against self-appointed, online fact-checkers – readers – who are, in contrast to the fact-checkers of yore who were only after verifying facts, sometimes out for blood.
Fact-checking, Then and Now
Fact-checking for print newspapers and magazines dates back to the early 1920s when Time magazine’s Edward Kennedy began employing a set of women to check facts in the magazine. The New Yorker followed suit in 1927. Using credible outside sources, these women took from reporters their notes, dates, interviews, etc. to verify the facts, statistics and quotes – anything and everything that was not opinion, and could be verified.
Today, fact-checking departments are still installed at such publications as the New Yorker, with a total of 16 fact-checkers on staff, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Forbes. The largest fact-checking department in the world can be found at Germany’s Der Spiegel. The full-time staff of about 80 fact-checkers and researchers at Der Spiegel work in different areas of expertise (including politics, science, foreign affairs, culture) so that the magazine can not only avoid mistakes, but foster what the publishers consider to be a special relationship between the reader and the magazine. They foster and maintain the public’s trust.
These days, due to budget cuts and downsizing, fewer print publications are using fact-checkers. Now the reporter’s or writer’s task of reporting and writing is combined with fact-checking – a dangerous combination, seeing a writer cannot always spot his/her own errors.
Of Promises, Politics and Pinocchios
There is an upward trend for fact-checking the statements, quotes and promises of politicians. And, without a doubt, in the United States a major focus of 2012 will be on the presidential election campaign.
Factcheck.org, founded by the Annenberg Policy Center in 1993, and politifact.com, a website of the Tampa Bay Times that was awarded a Pulitzer prize in 2009, have succeeded in proving themselves in the American media world as institutions campaigning for more transparency.
The Washington Post’s The Fact Checker checks the factual accuracy of politicians’ statements and rates it with one to four “Pinocchios.”
The Truth-o-Meter on PolitiFact.com checks quotes and statements made by politicians and rates the findings on a meter (green=true, red=false, and the all-out “Pants on fire” rating which equals “completely ridiculous”).
In addition to the words and actions of politicians being questioned, vetted and checked, however, there is a growing number of media-monitoring organizations that check up on the press. Media Matters for America, for example, checks facts for the Left; Accuracy in Media, on the other hand, checks facts for the political Right.
Transparency, Truth and the Future of Fact-Checking
For both the media and the public, transparency has now become the objective. Like the open data policy, which allows the public access to government files in the name of transparency, the media needs to be able to provide the correct facts in order to maintain its credibility in an environment in which one sentence in a blog post can discredit any fact.
Journalist Craig Silverman, author of “Regret the Error – How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech”, and founder of the website RegretTheError.com, believes that, in the future, more collaborative systems will develop in digital fact-checking. The combination of technical intelligence and human judgement will open up a whole realm of possibilities.
However, Silverman points out that the "culture of checking” that is on the rise mainly online “focuses largely on holding the press to account and pointing out its errors.” Facts are often used to expose biases and the inaccuracies of journalists. Some even go as far as to use fact checking “in pursuit of the truth” as weapons, to “cut people down” and use it as “ammunition for partisan hackery.”
Silverman quotes Salon.com journalist Gary Kamiya, who, in a 2007 essay entitled “The Readers Strike Back” addresses the issue of online readership feedback and its effects:
“Bloggers’ denunciation of the ‘imperial media’ can be overblown and paranoid, but it’s legitimate to expect journalists to accept criticism. Once you write something and send it out into the world, you don’t own it anymore: You offered it to the reader, and the reader has the right to respond as he or she wants. Before the Internet, it was easy for a journalist to behave like a sniper, rising furtively out of a foxhole, firing off a shot, then ducking back down to safety.”
As readers become more demanding of the press, taking measures into their own hands to get to the truth, the media is forced to aim for greater accuracy in the dissemination of information and facts.
Yet, this new public involvement raises a few questions: Who is to say whether the information gathered is in fact factual and correct? What qualifies as a fact? Who defines truth and who is qualified to monitor ensuing dialogs?
Whatever the changing parameters of online fact-checking, Silverman writes, “This culture of checking can at times be personal and vindictive, but it can also be revelatory, impassioned and highly effective. Most of all, it can simply not be ignored by the press.”
MyHue McGowran - A published print and online journalist, Mý Huê is currently a self-employed translator, copywriter, editor. She lives in Vienna, ...
