What Does Fact-Checking Mean?

RANGE OF MEANINGS

There is no consensus in regards to the use of the concept of “fact-checking”. It can imply diverse meanings for different media practitioners and different scholars. To draw a distinction between various senses of fact-checking, it is necessary to separate meaning of fact-checking: a) as internal procedure in journalism done in media organizations before the information is published and b) external fact-checking done by specialized organizations via verifying accuracy of information that is already published. 

FACT-CHECKING AS INTERNAL PROCEDURE OF JOURNALISM

Historical use of the concept of fact-checking relates to internal procedures of journalism designed to identify and to correct factual errors before information is published. It is based on the idea that in journalism reporting accurately means checking facts. The origin of the term can be dated back to the 1920s and 1930s when it emerged to describe a distinct professional role in news magazines. 

Internal fact-checking can be described as a specific stage in the content production process and can be used in an occupational sense, for example as a fact-checking department at a media organization. Term can also characterize a significant part of every journalist’s work of assembling information from multiple, sometimes conflicting sources into trustworthy accounts. 

Internal procedures of journalistic fact-checking and verification of the accuracy of information in online news media have been challenged significantly in the contemporary media ecosystem mostly because of deadline pressures caused by immediacy of online news. The need to distribute news rapidly often takes over the need to check and recheck facts and verification of accuracy in journalism has adapted to an environment where news media are not acting anymore as main gatekeepers of publicly available information.

EXTERNAL FACT-CHECKING

In contrast to internal fact-checking, external fact-checking refers to evaluation of a claim or text that is already published and is provided by different fact-checking outlets mostly as online publishing services. 

You can find different definitions of external fact-checking. For example, It used to be defined as: 

• the practice of systematically publishing assessments of the validity of claims made by public officials and institutions with an explicit attempt to identify whether a claim is factual (Walter et all, 2020);
• evolution of verifiable claims made in public statements through investigation of primary and secondary sources (Kriplean et al 2014). 

Overall, recent usage of the concept of „fact-checking“ describes an emerging form of journalism or new form of digital media based on public reports on the accuracy of claim or text that is already in circulation. This „external“ sense of fact-checking has become prevalent over the past 20 years with the growing number and visibility of websites dedicated to debunking falsehoods circulating online and / or repeated by politicians or other public figures. 

⬇️ REFERENCES:

• Graves, L., & Amazeen, M.  (2019, February 25). Fact-Checking as Idea and Practice in Journalism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. 
• Kriplean, Travis & Bonnar, Caitlin & Borning, Alan & Kinney, Bo & Gill, Brian. (2014). Integrating on-demand fact-checking with public dialogue. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. 1188-1199. 10.1145/2531602.2531677.
• Walter, Nathan & Cohen, Jonathan & Holbert, Robert & Morag, Yasmin. (2019). Fact-Checking: A Meta-Analysis of What Works and for Whom. Political Communication. 37. 1-26. 10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894.