Fact-Checking’s Big Players

“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”

— Jim Morrison

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a catchy graphic is worth a million. PolitiFact has the “Truth-O-Meter”. The Washington Post has its “Pinocchio scale”. Snopes’s iconic yellow lamp stands out from miles away.

One thing’s for certain — the fact-checkers sure know how to brand things. They aren’t short on general business acumen either. The phenomenon of fact-checking has asserted itself as a societal force to be reckoned with. It has swept across the globe, leaving little land untouched.

The summer of 2014 marked a major fact-checking milestone — the first ever “international conference” of political fact-checkers was held at the London School of Economics.

More than twenty countries and six continents were present. There was an assortment of major national newspapers, from London’s Guardian, Chile’s El Mercurio to Paris’s Le Monde. There was also a slew of smaller, independent fact-checking sites. It was an eclectic bunch. But, at the core of things, many attendees had a common vision in mind — political reformation. Lucas Graves, in his Deciding What’s True, paints the picture:

The founder of India’s FactChecker.in, which relies on academic researchers to investigate claims and journalists to edit their work, explained that the initiative grew out of a nationwide anticorruption movement. Egypt’s MorsiMeter emerged from a wave of volunteerism that accompanied the Arab Spring … Ukraine’s StopFake, a site launched just months before the [fact-checking conference] that specialized in exposing doctored photographs and bogus news accounts, had the narrowest mission: to counter “Russian propaganda.”

Many of these folks have that zeal for truth that only someone who’s known true oppression can acquire. It’s admirable. But I’m not only here to pat these fine people on the back. I’m also here to dig.

Whatever the supposed fact-checking “community” is, it’s situated in a complex and confusing milieu. The professional journalists themselves get the most airtime, but they make up only a portion of the picture. There’s bloggers. There’s media critics. There’s corporations and government agencies. There’s even comedians.

But whether or not these diverse faces have “political reformation” in mind and whatever their specific differences may be, they share one unified goal — the fact-checker seeks to distill parts of our complex world into easily digestible verdicts. In an interesting sense, the fact-checker is a teacher. He is a teacher of the masses.

I hope I’m permitted to ride on the coattails of this “teacher” metaphor for a bit. I’d like to examine America’s top three fact-checking entities in light of it. If I can pull this off, both the commonalities and differences between these companies should become abundantly clear.

If fact-checkers are professional grade teachers, we might as well call them professors. And if they’re professors, we might as well call the companies they work for universities.

If fact-checking companies are colleges, then FactCheck.org is a prestigious, if not snobby, Ivy League stomping ground. FactCheck.org was the first big time U.S. fact-checking site staffed by professional journalists. The site was founded by a veteran political reporter and a shrewd professor of communications. Its “home base” is the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

If FactCheck.org is the Ivy League powerhouse of fact-checking, then PolitiFact is its hipper, if not slightly less “talented” cousin. The former is Yale; the latter is UT Austin.

PolitiFact’s trademarked “Truth-O-Meter” arrived on the fact-checking scene in style. Whereas the Ivy League elite have genteel sophistication, the trendy state school students have pizzazz. In the beginning PolitiFact worked hard to separate itself from its esteemed competitor, brazenly if not cockily proclaiming, “PolitiFact … is bolder than previous journalistic fact-checking efforts because we’ll make a call.”

PolitiFact capitalized on the increasingly hyperconnected nature of the internet, building its journalism not around blog but around database. This begs another metaphor — if FactCheck.org was Myspace, PolitiFact was Facebook. Seen in this light, PolitiFact was an inevitable refinement of fact-checking technology. But it was by no means the end all, be all. Sticking with the big tech metaphor, we might ask, “So who is Twitter?”

What the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” lacks in originality of name it more than makes up for in craftiness of marketing. In the academic world, the Post’s Fact Checker is Reed College, maybe even Bard College. The Post’s operation fuses the sophistication of FactCheck.org with the nonconformity and divergent wit of PolitiFact.

Fact Checker’s “Pinocchio scale” represents a snazzier, cleverer upgrade over the innovative but somewhat bland “Truth-O-Meter”. But this group hasn’t limited itself to beguiling graphics. In 2013 the Washington Post changed the game. The world’s first “instant fact-checking” platform, Truth Teller — funded with a $50,000 grant — was unveiled. Instant fact-checking? The gist is this — anytime you watch a politician speak on the Post’s website, you get a real time, claim-by-claim fact check. In an age of instant access, Truth Teller stands as a trendy supplement to Fact Checker.