". . .Most media sites routinely assess the accuracy of political statements in the course of their reporting. Fact-checking teams are different. These researchers select significant political claims and set out to determine their veracity by combing through old news stories, speeches, past interviews, scientific and medical data, expert opinions, anything that could help distill fact from opinion. After that, the statements get rated, from the truthful to the ridiculous.
The aim is to choke off misinformation so it doesn’t enter the public discourse with the same force that it might have, and — ideally anyway — to act as a prophylactic that scares loose-tongued lawmakers out of making false claims.
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Usually packaged in colorful, easy-to-read graphics, fact checks have become wildly popular, thanks in part to last year’s election (and this year’s president). PolitiFact, the pacesetter and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for its work, had three times the traffic last year as it did the previous year and double what it had in the 2012 election. FactCheck.org, another big player, produced a video on a presidential debate last year that has drawn some 2.7 million views on Facebook. And NPR, a relatively new player, drew significant attention for its live annotations of last year’s presidential debates. Research is starting to accumulate about whether or not readers are swayed by fact checks, but it’s unquestionable that the public is reading them.
When they do their job well, fact checkers produce
passionless, straightforward assessments, with no evidence of
ideological leaning. Though Trump’s improvisational approach to the
truth has broken all records, fact checkers have found most politicians
will bend the truth if it helps them make a point. . .
"THE NEW YORK TIMES likes to proclaim its supremacy over all competitors in all categories. But it’s barely on the scoreboards in the journalistically fashionable realm of “fact-checking.”
Newsrooms across the continents have been building rapid-response reporting teams to evaluate the statements of political figures and assert whether they’re telling the truth. Turkey barely has a democracy, but it has a fact-checking site. Argentina has one that has helped seed others across Latin America. So do parts of Eastern Europe and Africa. Even some journalists in war-ravaged Syria started one. In the United States they’re everywhere, most of them attached to larger media organizations.
But one is only just now arriving at The Times, and so far it has one employee. . .
With the vast resources of The Times, it’s hard to understand its slow entry onto the track, but good for readers that it’s arrived. For all the droll Pinocchio noses and flaming-pants icons, these fact-check operations perform a significant public service, arguably as important to political accountability as any journalistic invention of the past decade. And if truth matters, as Times ads repeatedly proclaim, it’s worth building a team to ensure it."
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