Fact-Checking the Fact-Checking Industry
The subject of misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” has been one of the hottest topics in the political world since the 2016 presidential campaign, and it gained even more prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential campaign. Not surprisingly, that trend has continued during the current presidential election cycle.
The problem of inaccurate information has become so entrenched, in fact, that our political discourse, in the words of one author, has become “a steady drip of misinformation.”
A (Very) Brief History of Misinformation and Fact-Checking
Of course, misinformation—particularly in the political sphere—has been around for a long time. Its origin as a subject of popular discussion can be traced back to the 1830s with the rise of sensationalist newspapers. To push back on these outlets’ blatantly false and often lurid claims, the practice of “fact-checking” was born, beginning with the work of the then-recently founded (in 1846) Associated Press. Over the ensuing decades, several publications, including the New York World, Time magazine, and The New Yorker, established in-house fact-checking departments to ensure that their own reporting was accurate.
With the emergence of the internet, online news sources, and social media sites, this challenge has intensified. In response, a number of dedicated fact-checking operations have arisen in the post-1990 period, including The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and others. These efforts have been joined during the past several years by government fact-checking initiatives, including the federal government’s jawboning of social media platforms and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have contended have been a thinly veiled attempt at government censorship.
The Flaws in Fact-Checking
Despite these entities’ distinguished pedigree, researchers who have studied fact-checking and other attempts to reduce misinformation have reported conflicting findings in a number of respects. Specifically, fact-checking ratings have been either consistent across reviewers or inconsistent; fact-checking results have been found to be either intentionally biased, unintentionally biased, or fair and unbiased; and fact-checking outcomes have been shown either to change people’s beliefs and opinions, to have little effect on individuals, or to be inherently doomed to fail because no one can agree what constitutes a fact.
A 2020 article in Scientific American amplifies this duality: “Misinformation can be insidious; it can seep into the unconscious mind and influence beliefs and behaviors long after we have forgotten its source or the evidence invoked to support it.” Unfortunately, when it comes to modern-day political fact-checking, the overtly or covertly partisan nature of the exercise transforms “the truth as stated” into the “often … subjective opinion of people with shared political views.”
In this environment, the task of fighting misinformation is difficult enough to confront. But there is an even greater complication to address, which is “[t]he tendency of fact-checkers to pick and choose the claims” that they wish to confirm or refute—or, as one reviewer has labeled this inclination: “Just fact check the other guys” and “leave ‘[our own] side’ mostly unchallenged.” This selection bias is vividly illustrated in a 2013 study of the left-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact, as researchers determined that the website “rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President [Barack] Obama’s second term.”
The Song Remains the Same
A recent case study demonstrates that, if anything, this ideological bias has become even more severe.
On Aug. 10, 2024, in a post on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump asserted that a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris’ arrival at an Aug. 7 rally in Detroit, Michigan, was manipulated by artificial intelligence to show a large crowd when, in fact, in Trump’s words, there was no crowd at all.
Media outlets were quick to respond, pointing to numerous photographs that allegedly contradicted Trump’s statement. In fact, in the first four pages of a Google search we conducted on Aug. 19, fully 30 news sources—the vast majority of which were left-leaning—fact-checked Trump’s claim as false, with 20 using almost exactly the same headline: “Trump falsely [or baselessly] claims Harris campaign used AI to fake rally crowd.”
Very shortly thereafter, on Aug. 12, Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign posted an equally suspect statement on its official X site, in which the campaign stated that Trump seven years earlier had called white supremacists and neo-Nazis at a Charlottesville, Virginia rally “very fine people”—a misquoted remark that even the left-wing fact-checker Snopes debunked as false. However, the instant media condemnation that accompanied Trump’s statement turned into a mere whimper in the face of Harris’ equally false remark, as a comparable Aug. 12 Google search yielded only two negative “fact-check” references, just one of which was from a left-leaning site.
Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers
Fact-checking arose more than a century ago in the print world and nearly 30 years ago in the online realm with the noble aim of ensuring that the news being reported was accurate. Unfortunately, that worthwhile goal has been diminished to the point that its output has become barely distinguishable from political press releases. As the 2023 book Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers stated: “An industry that started in the 1990s by fact-checking chain emails and Bigfoot sightings has evolved over the past decade into the American political left’s strongest tool” for “shaping the national narrative in their favor. There may have been a brief era where the fact-checkers fact-checked facts—now they fact-check reality itself.”
Bottom line: If one wants to know the facts, fact-checkers may not necessarily be the last place to turn, but they certainly shouldn’t be the first.