5 ms·
It would be great if we could all just turn to an objective entity with all the facts. But there's no such person. Certainly not the average journalist. There's
by JI00912 5y ago
It would be great if we could all just turn to an objective entity with all the facts. But there's no such person. Certainly not the average journalist. There's just no such thing as a fact checker.
- sofixa 5y agoEveryone has their biases, but most are able to look over them in the face of facts. And the good thing about facts is that they're objective and indisputable. Moon landing ? Fact. Trump being US president? Fact. France winning the 2018 World Cup? Fact. So no, fact checkers do exist and are very important.
- JI00912 5y agoFacts exist. Fact checkers don't. It would be great if they did. We could just do away with science and ask a fact checker. But they don't exist.
- generalizations 5y agoAs long as the fact checkers stick with facts that are as obvious as the ones in your examples, then sure: they're objective and indisputable. However, people do dispute facts, and anything someone disputes is no longer in the purview of the fact checker, by your definition.
- argvargc 5y agoAll of those examples could be invalidated with new information. As inconvenient as it may be, truth is transitory and progress toward it is frequently made through invalidation. It's more prudent and useful to assume facts don't exist. As for "fact-checkers", who fact-checks them? (Etc...) The notion of visiting a webpage authored by God-knows-who to check whether what's on another webpage authored by God-knows-who is correct or not is absurd. And we haven't even gotten into subjectivity or nuance.
- rayiner 5y agoWhy is “fact-checking” always defended based on clear-cut examples when in reality fact checkers routinely wander into much more debatable territory?
- croon 5y agoWhy is fact-checking never attacked with oceans of examples of bad fact-checks? Fact-checkers as they exist right now are, with extremely few exceptions, exemplary. I would love to be proven wrong, but never have been. Edit: I can accept an argument (at least in theory) of fact-checkers being selective on what to fact check, but that would still not be an argument against fact-checking, but rather a call for more of it.
- teachingassist 5y ago"Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?" Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
- epgui 5y agoThis does not really match my perception of reality... Genuine ask: do you have a specific example of a respected fact-checking organization that you think does a poor job, or perhaps an academic paper which supports this position?
- teachingassist 5y agoI've never looked at academic papers before, but they mostly seem concerned with automated fact-checking, under an assumption that this is desirable. Papers looking at whether or not this is desirable tend not to come to that conclusion, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.843872 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.84... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.16... (2020 meta-analysis) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.1733613 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.17... I personally hold a belief that a fact-checking publisher has the same biases and profit-motives as any news publisher (or, as motive, political influence of the wealthy). I don't find it useful to distinguish fact-checking as special and call for specific research on this, as if existing academic research can always be invalidated by a simple re-branding.