Fact-checking

in Journalism

Video

This video highlights the importance of fact-checking in Canadian journalism.

Before entering the academy, Brad Clark worked as a journalist for 20 years in print and broadcasting. Brooks DeCillia spent more than two decades reporting and producing news at CBC. He teaches at Mount Royal University’s School of Communication Studies. Gabriela Perdomo Páez is an Assistant Professor of journalism at Mount Royal University. Born and raised in Colombia, Gabriela has worked as a journalist, educator and scholar in Latin America and Canada.

Journalism remains a “discipline of verification,” with journalists not only using facts to tell stories – but endeavouring to discover the “truth about the fact.” As journalists report a story, they check – and test – the accuracy of the information they use to craft their compelling narratives. They strive for accuracy. You can read more about the essential need for fact-checking here.

History of fact-checking

Fact-checking is not new to journalism. Checking the accuracy of information has been at the core of journalism for a long time. Additionally, journalists seek to expose hidden truths with their accurate reporting. In the progressive era, the reform-minded muckrakers – Nellie Bly, Julius Chambers and Ida Tarbell – unearthed corruption and wrongdoing with their factual reporting. Investigative journalists in Canada have also challenged powerful interests, including infiltrating criminal networks, exonerating the wrongly accused and even bringing down governments. The Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon from the White House in 1974 sparked a dramatic turn from just-the-facts reporting to much more critical and analytical reporting about politics and public affairs in the U.S. and Canada. In the early 2000s, Factcheck.org – a non-partisan and nonprofit website – began to challenge political spin to cut “the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”

Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash

Post hoc, prebunking & ante hoc fact-checking

These days, fact-checking takes many forms. It can be the accuracy tests journalists apply to their sources by asking them, for instance, how they know something or double-checking the accuracy of the math in a financial statement or press release about polling results. Fact-checking also includes internal vetting and editing that news organizations do before publishing. In recent years, fact-checking has also become synonymous with testing the accuracy and truthfulness of statements made by politicians and other high-profile people. Prebunking – a technique aimed at inoculating the public so they can identify and resist misinformation before it spreads – continues to gain traction as a way to warn people before they encounter misinformation and disinformation.

Post hoc fact-checking

Post hoc fact-checking attempts to establish the truthfulness of statements, claims, rumours and conspiracy theories. Post-hoc fact-checking goes beyond verification to "confrontation." It aims to combat misinformation and disinformation to correct misconceptions. To do this effectively, fact-checking “publicly endorses or challenges the truthfulness of another individual or organization." This type of fact-checking often checks the accuracy of prominent sources, such as politicians or celebrities. This type of after-the-fact fact-checking frequently comes with visualizations – Pinocchios from The Washington Post or PolitiFact’s TRUTH-O-METER – that measure the truthfulness of the claims. Several high-profile organizations, including Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Full Fact in the UK and Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs, regularly work to expose the truth and correct false or dubious statements present in the public domain.

For instance, Donald Trump's repeated distortions, misinformation, and baseless conspiracy theories about his defeat in the 2020 U.S. presidential election triggered considerable fact-checking. See for example

Fact check: Trump lost the 2020 presidential election

Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies

Claims that the 2020 election was stolen are still false

Prebunking

Gaining in prominence, prebunking involves building preemptive resilience to misinformation and disinformation. Akin to medical immunization, journalists or officials “preemptively" warn and expose the public "to weakened doses of misinformation" to create "mental antibodies against” fake information.

The idea is simple: expose people to the techniques and tropes embedded in misleading information before encountering it in the real world. This, in turn, makes people better equipped to recognize and resist misinformation and disinformation. In 2022, for example, federal law enforcement officials in the United States released a public service announcement highlighting that cyberattacks are unlikely to disrupt voting. In the lead-up to elections in Europe in 2023, Google released several short video advertisements spotlighting common misleading claims on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Research shows that exposure to common techniques – "polarization, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people online, deflecting blame, and impersonating fake accounts" – builds resistance to online misinformation.

Ante hoc fact-checking

Ante hoc or internal or editorial fact-checking involves news organizations – magazines in particular – checking the accuracy of reporters before publishing. It’s a long-established practice that predates our current post-truth era of misinformation and disinformation. The Truth in Journalism Fact-Checking Guide explains that the ante hoc approach “independently verifies every factual statement included in the story and flags any necessary corrections.”

The Truth in Journalism Fact-Checking Guide offers step-by-step instructions for testing the accuracy of stories before publishing. The guide recommends a two-layered principle, “which holds that there are always two distinct steps to establishing a statement in a journalistic story: first, reporting; then, verification.” The guide distinguishes between internal and external fact distinctions.

The Truth in Journalism Fact-Checking Guide outlines a rigorous methodology for conducting ante hoc or editorial fact-checking, including conducting fact-checking interviews, working with topic documents/sources, formatting fact-checking documents and keeping good records.

Post hoc Fact-checking methodology

Protestors with a sign that reads "I can't believe we are marching for facts."

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Post hoc fact-checking focuses on topics in the public interest, usually made by politicians or celebrities. Fact-checking news services, such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Full Fact in the UK and Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs, are underpinned by the idea that citizens in democracies need factual information to make informed decisions. The co-founder of FactCheck.org wanted the website to be “a resource for those citizens who honestly are bewildered and confused and looking for help in sorting out fact from fiction.”

Proponents of journalistic fact-checking liken their efforts to science’s rigorous methods and procedures, “constantly inventing, discarding, and refining theories to explain the confusion of the contemporary world.” Post hoc fact-checking reflects “a watchdog endeavour that checks information after it has already been published” or a process of “comparing” the statements of elites “to ‘the facts’ so as to determine whether a statement about these topics is a lie.”

Consistent with best practices in journalism, most of the big fact-checking organizations – FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes.com, Full Fact, and Décrypteurs – follow dependable and logical practices for deciding what and how to fact-check questionable claims. FactCheck.org stresses its commitment to the “best practices of both journalism and scholarship.

The things journalists fact-check

All major fact-checking organizations focus on verifiable facts, not opinions. Still, they may drift into putting the origins of political rhetoric under the microscope.

In outlining its process, Politifact offers a checklist of questions when determining what curious or questionable statements to check:

Is the information or statement verifiable? If it’s an opinion, there’s no need to fact-check the claim.
Does the statement seem curious or questionable? Is it misleading?
Is the statement important enough to fact-check? Slips of the tongue are not worthy of a check.
Is the statement in the public interest because it may get repeated?
Would a typical person pause and wonder if the statement is true?

Selection

News organizations often apply a public interest test when selecting what to fact-check. The topic – and the person – being fact-checked need to be a matter that could potentially influence public health, security, governance or livelihoods. Before starting a fact-check, ask yourself if there is a public good in checking the accuracy of the claim in question – and will the repetition of the misleading claim cause harm? There’s no point in fact-checking ludicrous statements made by a person with no public platform and no chance of having their claims repeated. A prime minister or a premier has a much larger microphone than someone with 18 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter).

FactCheck.org’s commitment to the public interest is clear in its mission to serve as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit ‘consumer advocate’ for voters, regardless of their party affiliation.” Snopes, for its part, produces fact-checks about “whatever items the greatest number of readers are asking about or searching for at any given time, without any partisan considerations.”

Sources to fact-check

With the public’s interest in mind, fact-checking organizations scrutinize people – politicians, officials, celebrities, and influencers – in the public eye. Fact-checkers look for claims to check by watching and scrutinizing the news, public affairs shows, political ads, campaign material, politicians’ remarks and speeches, transcripts of interviews, and cable news shows.

Fact Checker at The Washington Post uses the words of politicians as a springboard of sorts to begin its investigation, stressing it does not want to “elevate false claims that have received relatively little attention on social media.” FactCheck.org and PolitiFact attempt to dedicate equal time to checking the truth of claims made by Republicans and Democrats. Similarly, The Washington Post highlights its effort to “be dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.”

Research

Fact-checking is grounded in good journalism. PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker all ground their fact-checking in common sense or logic, applying a “reasonable person standard” for determining the truth of claims – fact-checking demands rigorous research methods, including pouring over transcripts of statements that can be truth-checked. The journalists doing this work rely on primary – authoritative – sources of information – non-partisan government reports, original data, including peer-reviewed scholarship, official documents and statistics. – to check the truth of claims. Second-hand sources are unacceptable for determining the truth of questionable claims and statements.

Fact-checking also requires independent corroboration – and transparency about the sources of information used to check the accuracy of information. FactCheck.org, for example, always discloses biographical information, including previous government or campaign work. Snopes’ research process highlights its efforts to interview experts and “search for printed information (news articles, scientific and medical journal articles, books, interview transcripts, statistical sources)” that can help determine the accuracy of the claim or statement under scrutiny.

Ratings

Fact-checks frequently come with visualizations – Pinocchios from The Washington Post or PolitiFact’s TRUTH-O-METER – that measure the truthfulness of the claims. FactCheck.org, for its part, often labels claims misleading or false. Politifact’s TRUTH-O-METER ranges from truth to pants on fire to pass judgment on the accuracy of statements.

Editing

Street art of a young boy wearing a bandana around his nose and mouth positioned to throw an explosive, however instead of an explosive in his hand he has a bouquet of flowers.

Before any fact-checking gets published, editors scrutinize or fact–check it. A misleading or inaccurate fact-check is, well, pretty embarrassing. Fact-checkers work hard to produce accurate work that will stand the test of accuracy.

Snopes, for instance, passes its final product through at least one editor for vetting. FactCheck.org rigorously line edits, copy edits and fact-checks its stories “line by line, word by word, to make sure that every fact is correct and every statement… is accurate and based on the evidence” (FactCheck.org, 2022).

Corrections

Mistakes happen from time to time, and it's important to correct them quickly. All the big fact-checking services encourage readers to submit potential corrections for review. All organizations stress that they are transparent about making their corrections public-facing. For major errors of facts, PolitiFact updates its reporting with new information and an archived copy of the previous story. On top of that, the new text appears marked as updated. Corrected fact checks receive a “Corrections and Updates” tag.

Summary of post hoc fact-checking methodology

Test Your Knowledge

Why does fact-checking focus on public officials and celebrities?

The topic – and the person – being fact-checked need to be a matter that could potentially influence public health, security, governance or livelihoods. Fact-checks scrutinize misleading claims that can cause harm.