I just realized it’s officially been one year since I started this blog! I’d like to say that’s worth celebrating but the fact that this blog still exists is not a sign of hope for the news industry. Either way, I’m in this project until things get better (or until I get shut down – whichever comes first) and still honored after 12 months to be sharing anything I can to help people see through the current media mess. A big thank you to loyal and new readers alike who have offered encouragement, questions, comments and support!
Meantime… it’s been a few weeks since I wrote in here and – wow! – a lot has happened in the world of news. Honestly, I hardly know where to pick back up again.
The elephant in the middle of the room, of course, is the COVID Delta variant. I promise, we’ll get to that soon. For now, though, remember to keep looking past vague generalizations about “rising numbers” and search instead for any hard data about serious cases that you can find. I’m not talking about info regarding general trends or percentage increases (*Remember! The difference between 1 COVID case and 50 COVID cases is a seemingly shocking 5,000% increase… until you consider we live in a nation of 330,000,000 people). I’m talking about cold, hard and very specific numbers of people – children and / or adults – who are sick, hospitalized, and dying solely of COVID. If you cannot find this information in a news story you are watching or reading, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re ingesting opinion, speculation and/or propaganda instead of news; my advice is to move on and not take the bait. Life’s too short.
We’ll also likely check in on the media’s Afghanistan coverage soon, too - a tragic and frightening event, to be sure, but also a massive opportunity for U.S. journalists to redeem themselves with hard-hitting, non-partisan reporting; I’m intensely curious as to whether they will rise to the occasion.
But this week I want to ease back into things by touching on something that’s been on my to-do list for a while: fact checking. It came to light a few days ago after Buzzfeed News broke this story about how David Mikkelson, the co-founder and editor of a “fact-checking” website called Snopes, was actually a serial plagiarist who also frequently published under a completely – and bizarrely complex – fake identity / alias.
The story was covered in publications ranging from the NY Times and NY Post to USA Today and the National Review, and is all the more humiliating because Snopes is one of Facebook’s official “Fact-checking partners” AND because Snopes describes itself as “the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource” and “the oldest and most respected fact check site online.” Oops.
If you have time, read the Buzzfeed piece – it’s a fascinating look at how easy it is today to deceive readers into thinking a website is a credible, substantial and established business, when in fact it’s barely more than one amateur guy and a handful of paid writers. It also shows how easy it is to pass off a completely made-up persona as real in the era of anonymous internet “experts.”
Either way, as noted, the story brings up the larger topic of fact-checking - a term that you’ve likely recently heard used. In this week’s post, we’re going to cover what fact-checking really is, how it’s really supposed to work and how it’s currently being weaponized by some “journalists” to attack people, media outlets and information they don’t like (no surprise there, right?).
Let’s start with the history, which I actually didn’t know until I set out researching this post. I found two great pieces on the history of fact-checking online – this one from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) – a BIG name in the world of Journalism - and another from Time Magazine, which, alongside The New Yorker, was among the earliest adopters of fact-checking. They’re both fascinating and at times very funny pieces – case in point: these descriptions of how fact-checkers used to be perceived, which are not for the “woke” of heart:
Friedrich, of
Harper’s
, described the archetypal fact checker as “a girl in her twenties, usually from some Eastern college, pleasant-looking but not a
femme fatale
. She came from college unqualified for anything, but looking for an ‘interesting’ job. After a few years, she usually feels, bitterly and rightly, that nobody appreciates her work.” …
“
The New Yorker
’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.
Fun and old school stereotypes aside, fact checkers are basically researchers who verify that the factual information reporters put in their stories is actually true. The more crucial thing to know about fact-checking is that it has always been – until very recently – done in-house, before articles went to press; ie: New Yorker staffers would fact check New Yorker articles before they were published; Time staffers would fact-check Time articles before press time, etc.
These days, unfortunately, most magazines I’ve written for do NOT have fact-checkers on staff or even on retainer. In fact, one magazine required ME to fact-check my own work, which is kind of like asking a college student to grade his or her own term paper (ie: not a good idea). That said, the magazine I write for most often is one of the few left that still does have fact checkers on staff; it’s a big reason I love writing for them. Two years ago, in fact, when I made a bad math error and grossly miscalculated a data number about kids not graduating high school, it was a skilled fact-checker who caught the error before publication and fixed it.
Basically, the fact-checkers who’ve worked on my stories do two major things: 1. They verify data and factual information via research, and 2. They contact everyone I’ve quoted to be sure what I’ve quoted them as saying is accurate (*when people dispute the quotes, we refer to audio tapes of the interviews for reference). But again, the main thing to remember is that traditionally, the fact checkers are on the same team as the writers; ie: they both work for the same organization and want to convey accurate information to readers. Historically, fact checkers have no agendas at all. They simply want the information their publication is presenting to the world to be correct.
Some time in the last 20 or so years, though, fact-checking started taking on a very different tone. As the internet and social media eclipsed established news outlets in their abilities to convey information in real time, and as established news outlets’ budgets dwindled, fact-checking began falling by the wayside. As one veteran reporter told me for an article (paraphrasing here): “We started focusing more on being first then being right.” At roughly that same point, a lot of organizations either stopped fact-checking their articles altogether OR started doing it AFTER stories were already published, instead of BEFORE. This quote from the CJR article says it best:
Since the dawn of the digital age, upstart and august publications alike have largely abandoned fact-checking when it comes to online stories. Unlike print, digital content is never completely set in stone, so websites have returned to an ethos closer to that of the
New York World
’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, issuing post facto corrections as needed in lieu of prepublication checking.
Suffice to say, that’s a pretty irresponsible use of fact-checking – not unlike the “do it now and beg forgiveness later” mantra an old colleague of mine used to live by. But the bigger problem is that things didn’t stop there. Somewhere in the last decade or so, media outlets started using fact checking as a kind of weapon they could wield against competing media outlets and politicians. Poynter (another big name in Journalism) apparently pioneered its own “Truth-O-Meter” in 2007 and the Washington Post has had its “Pinocchio” system for a while, now. And then there’s Politifact, an entire website solely dedicated to fact-checking both news stories and random things people say in media interviews and post online or on social media.
They might seem like good ideas at first, but as time has passed, the work these “fact-checking” projects produce often resembles that old school description of fact checkers we read above - marred by bitter groupthink and petty at best or inaccurate at worst. Two great examples?
INACCURATE: This Politifact piece that supposedly debunks the claim that the government isn’t testing border migrants for Covid, but the best part bar none is where the writers admit that they have no actual testing numbers because the government refuses to give them any actual testing numbers. And then they conclude that “It’s unclear how many migrants may be bypassing COVID testing screens.”
PETTY: The database the Washington Post compiled to track, in real time, every single one of the “false or misleading claims” made by President Trump during his entire term in office, which – as of January 2020 – had made it to 29,508 claims. What’s interesting is that the same paper, whose mantra is “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” has yet to compile a similar database for President Biden. Either way, here’s a HuffPost article about it; I’m sure a quick online search will yield the database itself.
I have no doubt that these two “fact check” projects contain varying elements of both truth and subjective overstatement. But, as is always the case with the media these days, the real issues here actually have nothing to do with COVID numbers or specific things Trump said. The real issue in both cases is that the media / “experts” are working overtime to maintain control of the narrative and messaging they want you, the consumers, to hear: that you should be terrified of COVID except in the case of migrants and that Trump is allegedly a chronic liar. In both cases, Politifact and the Washington Post are using the “fact check” platform as a means of driving their messaging home.
How do I know this? One part instinct (after so many years watching people in media do this I can’t really un-see it anymore) and one part research. Turns out I found all the explanation I needed in this great (and unintentionally honest) piece published by Poynter. The most telling quote of the whole thing was this:
“Fact-checkers very much want to reject the tradition of “he said, she said” reporting.”
Ah. So now we’re getting somewhere. Apparently, some of these new-age “fact checkers” aren’t really trying to clarify information so much as they’re trying to stifle debate. If you read my very first ever Navigating News post, you know a major force in the destruction of traditional journalism has been a bizarre attempt by some current reporters to abolish “he said, she said” and “both sides” reporting. In other words, when “fact checking” is used in this capacity, it’s strangely helping destroy the very journalism it claims to be trying to protect.
I will say one thing in defense of these new-age “fact-checkers:” no journalist wants to print or reference a quote that contains information which is exaggerated, wrong or isn’t technically true. But as a good friend once told me (again, paraphrasing), most of life is a grey area… and that includes the way real people - the same people we use as sources for news stories every day - speak.
My main beef with these newly weaponized “fact checkers” is this: Who are we as journalists to be expecting such precision from our sources, and constantly correcting them when they misspeak? Thinking about the Snopes founder in particular, I’d say some of this nation’s preferred “fact check experts” are pretty unreliable sources of information themselves.
Here’s a novel idea: what if - instead of calling in the “fact-checkers” every five minutes - journalists started just unemotionally presenting what they see as the conflicting hard data in another sentence, right beside the quote in question, and letting readers make up their own minds about what’s really true? But of course, I operate on the assumption that my readers are intelligent human beings who can read and decide things for themselves. Most journalists today don’t seem to agree.
Bottom line? Fact checkers are real and they do have a crucial and important place in journalism… but not in the way they’re currently being publicly utilized. Keep that in mind the next time you see a published “fact check.” Read it if you want, but be forewarned – it’s usually not really a true “fact check” so much as an attempt to control the conversation and sway your opinion.