Why we need fact checkers

As traditional media faces challenges from social media, fact checking is a lost art

Writer Jay McInerney attends the Esquire 80th Anniversary and Network Launch Event in New York. Evan Agostini/ AP

The United States presidential election has thrust the issue of fact checking back on to our radars. As the candidates debate and share their visions for the country, media organisations (and even average people on social media) rush to correct their “facts”. Technology companies such as Google and Facebook now offer their users “fact checked” article verification for search results about the election.

Fact checking is an art that has long been a crucial ingredient of the reputable media establishment. Done correctly, fact checking is a laborious process that far exceeds simple web searches to confirm information.

Journalists have an incredible amount of power in the manner in which they interpret facts. They are able to weave delicate narratives with the words of the other people. Thus, the role of the fact checker – a good fact checker anyway – is not to confirm what a subject said to a journalist but to ascertain the premise of the interview the journalist is reporting.

A newspaper or magazine's reputation once rested on its ability to discern fact from fiction and verify its sources. The New Yorker magazine is one of the most famous publications in the world when it comes to fact checking. In our world of instant information, The New Yorker takes the time to vet every source that it publishes and many of the magazine's long-time writers began their tenure in the fact-checking department. Jay McInerney, one such alumnus, went on to write the best selling book Bright Lights, Big City about life in New York in the late 1970s and working at the magazine.

With the rise of internet publications that pride themselves on breaking news quickly, fact checking appears to be suffering a slow death.

During the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, for example, a flood of young journalists with little experience in the complexity of the Middle East began covering the protests as freelancers and updating social media. The result was a deluge of unvetted information that often turned out to be false. Fact checking had been abandoned in favour of speed.

Social media provides an immediate window into breaking news events from a unique perspective. It is also cheaper than maintaining an expensive fact-checking department. But that doesn’t overshadow the critical role that fact checkers play in the creation of lasting journalism.

Efforts by Google and others to highlight articles that abide by acceptable standards of fact checking help readers sift through the sheer amount of information available to them.

The future is unclear for human fact checkers, as more and more young journalists get their start in the field as opposed to the fact-checking departments of magazines. It may be that, in the future, we rely on others to check the facts after the story has been published.