“People use fact-checks to dunk on the other side, to cherry-pick information, and to counter-fact-check other fact-checks.”
The Washington Post does it. So do The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, and The Daily Caller: fact-checking.
In fact (no pun intended), fact-checking is so successful/important/sought after/self-reproducing (take your pick) that in 18 years, the number of fact-checking organizations has grown from one in 2003 to 349 worldwide in 2021, according to the Duke Reporter’s Lab. And while verifying what really happened — discerning between what’s true and what is not — is inherently tied to journalism, it usually occurs before journalists file their stories. Fact-checking, however, usually happens after the fact — so after something worthy of fact-checking happened.
Fact-checking is often conducted by independent organizations, such as FactCheck.org or PolitiFact. But over time, more and more news organizations have also started doing their own formal fact-checks — thinking that this de facto journalistic genre of fact-checking can help keep misinformation at bay. To be clear, my prediction (or hope, rather) is about the news organization genre of fact-checking, not fact-checking as a whole.
The underlying assumption of fact-checking is, of course, that when presented with facts, people adjust their beliefs accordingly. And, in general, it seems to do just that: When presented with facts that correct erroneous beliefs, people sometimes will change their...
The Management of Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals has addressed claims suggesting that its petroleum products are exported to Lomé and subsequently re-imported into Nigeria. Calling ...