Thoughts on Fact-checking

The American presidential election is over, thank goodness, and I'm in the process of separating the important lessons from the emotional drama of the last few months.

On the journalism side, one of the most interesting topics has been the conflict between balance and fact-checking, which I find to be just as polarising as the Bias vs Objectivity debate in some cases (hi there, PolitiFact).

The issue was summed up in this article from The New York Times's public editor Margaret Sullivan. The rise of fact-checkers, she said, was "all a part of a movement — brought about, in part, by a more demanding public, fueled by media critics, bloggers and denizens of the social media world — to present the truth, not just conflicting arguments leading to confusion."

Sullivan uses the example of a front-page article about voter fraud and vote suppression, which took a "balanced" approach despite there being no known evidence of in-person voter fraud. The reporter Ethan Bronner said "the purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out," and national editor Sam Sifton said it was not the paper's job to litigate the argument: "We need to state what each side says."

I'm mostly on the "truth squad" side. If you don't include fact-checking in your reporting, you leave yourself vulnerable to politicians who manipulate the media with PR and spin.

At the same time, I can kind of see Bronner and Sifton's point: we do need to pay attention to what everyone is saying. You can't challenge a lying politician if you don't examine what the lie is and why it's effective - in this case, why accusations of voter fraud were so often aimed at poor, predominantly African-American districts.

Maybe Bronner meant for his story to be a starting point in a range of coverage that would provide the proper context. If so, he needed to make that clear from the beginning.

Another thing I've noticed is the rising popularity of fact-checking blogs, which is encouraging at first glance but deserves a bit of scrutiny. Sometimes these websites seem to be less about the broader truth and more about delivering public smackdowns to people we don't like. Which is more satisfying, after all: a nuanced rebuttal in the last paragraph of a news story, or a Pants On Fire! rating from PolitiFact?

It makes me worry that we're exposing fact-checking to the competition for page clicks and skewing yet another aspect of journalism toward sensationalism, which would create more confusion than clarity.