Release 0.9: We're All Fact-Checkers Now

At a recent editors' conference in which I took part, a small crowd gathered to talk about journalism and new media. When I told the group that I had begun my career as a magazine fact-checker, several of them grew misty-eyed, as if someone had told a group of priests about his childhood as an altar boy.

I brought up my past because I think that fact-checking is the single best training not just for journalism, but for life in general. It teaches you to think skeptically. It is easy to believe something when someone who appears knowledgeable asserts it. But if you have a responsibility for checking facts, you listen more carefully.

On what sources does the speaker base his facts? Is there something in it for him - a higher stock price, an advertising fee, or someone else's gratitude? Or is he simply biased because of the people he knows, the company he works for, or the attitudes he picked up at home?

I spent hours picking through sources - mostly dusty papers in the years before the Internet, or strangers on the telephone - to clarify questions of fact: Was this really the first such product? Was Mr. Smith 42 or already 43? Was his claim that revenues had grown for the last five years true merely because of acquisitions that his company had made? And so on.

My life was ruled by tk - which stands for "to kum," or "to come," in the jargon of reporters. We fact-checkers would joke about the lazy reporters who would hand us copy such as, "Juan Tigar, tk years old, grew up in tk before studying at tk. Now tk title at Widgets Corp., he..." Our job was to fill in the tk's.

But we learned an enormous amount. We learned not just thousands of facts that I have since forgotten, but an attitude of skepticism coupled with reverence for the truth.

That attitude contrasts with the skepticism I once heard from a Russian reporter about her early days on the job. "Whenever we read an article about the health dangers of butter, we would immediately run out and buy as much butter as we could find," she told me. "We knew it meant there was about to be a butter shortage." In other words, Russians looked only for the agenda, the motivation behind the assertion. The actual truth was irrelevant.

Of course, spin, propaganda, and censorship persist in journalism, but with one big difference: Almost anyone can now operate as a reporter. How can we ensure that these self-nominated reporters respect the truth?

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has announced plans to require bloggers and celebrity endorsers to disclose gifts or payments from vendors and others seeking the bloggers' positive comments online. But what about other kinds of bias?

As the journalistic priesthood erodes and everyone can become a citizen reporter or commentator, regulating or training all would-be journalists is not the answer. In line with the bottom-up, do-it-yourself ethos of the Internet, where people book their own flights, publish their own photos, and sell their own second-hand goods, it should be the users' responsibility to do their own fact-checking.

This is not to say that journalists should not check their own facts (or that priests should not observe the tenets of their own religion). But in the end, everyone has to become a better reader - more skeptical and more curious. Why is this story getting so much attention? Does this blogger ever say anything negative, or is she always talking about the great products she uses? Does she have any kind of disclosures on her blog? Why is this politician saying nice things about that politician? What company does the product reviewer work for?

Governments can impose regulations, but in the end we will get the kind of journalism for which we ask. If we ask for it, Web sites will offer not just content but reputation systems, so that contributors will have reputations as reliable sources (or not).

We should not outlaw anonymity (which has its uses), but we can ask for details about the people whose words we are reading. Someone may legitimately want to remain anonymous, but we can draw our own conclusions about their reasons.

That much thinking may sound like a lot of work, but it is what is required of a responsible adult these days. Compared to a century ago, more people spend less time laboring to ensure their physical existence. But, in this increasingly confusing world, we need to spend a little more time laboring to ensure our own intellectual integrity - a task that we cannot outsource to governments or even to media. Facts are holy, but not all media that claim to report them, "new" or old, can be trusted.

Previously distributed by Project Syndicate.

 

 

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Comments

[infopro20]

Excellent article. I firmly believe the most important thing we should be teaching in school is critical thinking / how to ask questions. Someone once said that asking questions can be a radical act.
It's not just what we read. It's what we hear and see, as well, that need to be looking at critically. Democracy requires it.

[RaisingAwareness]

Thanks for writing this article.

[rsimanski]

I started out as a newspaper reporter in 1965. Since then, I have seen the gradual decline of both newspaper and broadcast journalism.

Fact-checking? Newspapers don't even do copy editing anymore. Reporters for the Washington Post, my local newspaper, used to do solid investigative reporting. Now they take a string of quotes from spin doctors and call it analysis. I'm tired of reporters quoting sources who cannot be named.

If you want to get a good idea of how badly journalism has declined in the past 30 years, watch All the President's Men, then watch State of Play. The first film did a marvelous job of showing how a great newspaper, the Washington Post, worked at that time. Woodward and Bernstein had to back up the leads that they got from Deep Throat with solid reporting. The newspaper had great journalistic standards.

State of Play seems to be based on the practices of the New York Post, which was never a great newspaper. Nevertheless, it shows how almost all newspapers today have fallen victim to the bean counters who could care less about producing a great newspaper.

If we can't rely on newspapers or broadcast journalism anymore, where do we go? The burden is on us to pick and choose our sources carefully, and to recognize that even the best often have biases that prevent them from being objective. There are good reporters out there, but it's up to us to be discriminating, use our heads, and be selective.

[kyeshinka]

This is all very easy. It's too bad Americans have taken this long to realize we don't have a reliable press. And most still don't. You should all be very cautious about any news from any source, especially when it covers world events. Anyone ever notice that supposedly opposite sources MSNBC and Fox News have vastly different facts when it comes to health care, global warming, and torture, but curiously have the same facts and info when it comes to more complicated issues like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, etc. This should be reversed, especially considering that facts are a lot harder to come by. This alone should make you very distrustful of American news. I have one source of news that I trust, because they have been right since I've been reading for 10 years. It's the exile, formerly based in Moscow. Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, they were right about the Russian crash in 1998, been right about Goldman Sachs for 10 years, and are right now, and have very little to gain by pulling our chain.

[Patrick Dacre]

Hmm..Fact Checking. As Ms. Dyson is well aware, the definition of a FACT is fluid. And a journalist, may in fact, be someone that simply journals. "Having been raised inside the NY metro newspaper and radio business, I have seen, time and again, how broadcast and publishing deadlines, drive Factoid checking. What the net presents, in my view, is an option for review, cross referencing, and perhaps an open forum for discussion. So, let the Facts, such as they are, prevail or fail.

Want some Good News today?

http://www.goodnewstogo.com

Quite a nice break from the usual, methinks.

Patrick Dacre
Chief Encouragement Officer
HarmonyNet Media Group
And International Peace Correspondent
PeaceMakers News Report

[Rudabekia]

I don't think we expect anybody to tell the truth anymore. Lies are so ingrained into our lives that it would be detrimental to our mental health to have to face the truth.

[Bill Sell]

And don't be fooled by a title. We have Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, born at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism. They wrote a pro-Cato rant on high speed rail last July. I'm documenting the sloppy writing, and have established evidence that they fabricated a US Government Accountability Office "conclusion" to make it appear the US is opposed to high speed rail. Other lesser crimes abound in their slip-shod analysis. See it at UppityWisconsin.com under my pen name SocratesChildren.

[kells1001]

What your really asking is how do we make people be more responsible when reporting their agenda. Please no blatant easily refutable lies? No Opinions? What is Fox News? Who is Wallstreet? The real answer is once again more about Pure Capitalism, Greed, Free Markets which obviously rely on debasing the truth.

[Indon]

Well, it's all well and good to talk about how the internet facilitates widespread fact-checking in an abstract sense.

But might I suggest, instead, applying that understanding towards teaching people practical lessons on how to fact-check? Even if they're newbie tips for people without much time to spend on it.

Take Snopes. Every once in a while one of my fellow workers brings up something that basically screams, "Urban legend". So I check it on Snopes and generally it is just that. Knowing how to use even one resource like that could so vastly improve our ability, as a culture, to propagate good information and shut down bad information.

So I can only imagine what an expert might be able to contribute to the subject.

[Frenbar]

The lack of accuracy and fact checking is a huge problem for all journalists, but the suggestion that somehow bloggers or self declared journalists are somehow less scrutinized is just wrong. Mainstream corporate media outlets of every kind are chock full of inaccuracies and outright lies every day. There is absolutely 0 standard for truth and fact checking by "traditional journalists", and therefore they cannot be worse then anyone else.

[andyboy]

Great point Frenbar,

For instance as I sit here Hannity just said and I quote him verbatim, "Obama bankrupted Social Security and Medicare"

As if that isn't enough he immediately follows with this bon mot..."Nobody thought Obama would take over every industry".

Hannity is not some blogger and has no reputation system rating.

This guy flat out lies. Huge whopping lies.

You don't need to fact check him. And as you can see when these types are shown the door and asked politely to leave they become highly irate and start whooping and hollering about how hateful it is that nobody likes or trusts them in the real world outside the placenta of the radio show or tv set and if "they" can do it to Rush Limbaugh "they" can do it to you too.

You or I would just chalk it up to being unpopular.

[1tourist]

Ever since G.W.Bush told us that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attack, and continued to put forth that lie after the 9/11 commission stated that it was not true, that none of the attackers were Iraqi, but 16 of them were Saudi,s, it become increasingly difficult to sort fact from opinion and fiction. There appears to be very little emphasis on facts in the mainstream media, and when there is, it is so shrouded in opinion and spin, that it requires all of us to be fact checkers just to make sense of what we are being fed.

[Hiphopcrates]

When have credentialed journalists been held to the truth?

[noneIn2008]

What would be unique is to see someone, anyone, act as a journalist. Being skeptical and probing to find the truth. Instead we have gangs of spin artists and PR people working as the media.

[rtolmach]

Of the tk posts I read on HuffPo today, this was the best.

[RButler]

I like the way The Daily Show finds and shows video clips of people saying one thing one day and another thing the next day. I wish the real news shows had the resources to do that that Comedy Central has. Just joking.

[DickS]

My republican friends are beginning to get angry with me. They send me all of the stories flying around from Rush, Beck, Fox News etc. etc. as the gospel truth and proof that O'Bama is a communist or worse. When I send them proof that it is all a lie, they really get upset. Republicans lie, lie, lie.

P.S. I voted Republican and I am ashamed.

[mejamom]

Wow. I could've written that. I've been saying how I expect politicians to lie. But when the people like Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh, who set themselves up as altruistic vendors of the truth for the ignorant masses lie, then something's wrong. Those are the people who should be ashamed of themselves.
The bottom line, though, seems to be that the amount of fact checking does nothing for the people who've made up their minds and don't want to be "confused" by the facts.

[1tourist]

The real problem is in the volume of opinion and spin that gets presented as news.