Fear of the fact-checker

The Sunday morning news show "This Week" on ABC has teamed with PolitiFact to do a post-interview fact-check of whatever claims are made by guests during the course of the program.

"Meet the Press" host David Gregory was asked if he'd support a similar arrangement on his show. He said he'd rather leave it up to the viewers to sort fact from fiction.

Which sounds like a weak way to rationalize that MTP didn't think of the fact-check idea first. But the question remains: What harm could come from providing viewers with additional information with which to sort things out? For one, it would make high-profile spinners uncomfortable and the host look woefully unprepared. Is that the real reason why Gregory balked?

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly questions Gregory's strained logic:

Gregory's comments suggest a more traditional approach: let viewers figure things out "on their own terms." Why separate fact from fiction for news consumers when they can do that on their own?

Perhaps because they aren't well equipped to do this on their own, and rely on professional news outlets to provide them with reliable information.

(found via Romenesko)

Facts for factions, second take

The people most opposed to the idea of objective journalism often are people who believe in objective truths. They consider editorial efforts to moderate language and viewpoints on tough issues - illegal immigration, torture, war, abortion - a cop out.

Subjective journalism rose up to cater to this crowd and has at times focused laser light on controversies that got swept aside when presented in moderated tones. But there's a viral strain of subjective journalism that claims to be objective and it is has helped erode the belief that any journalists can their facts straight.

To be sure, not all journalists can, and there are some newsrooms that get so careful with words that they serve up water and pretend it's soup. For these reasons, public skepticism of the media is healthy. But the selling of subjectivity as objectivity has done far worse damage to the idea of impartial journalism and accelerated cultural factionalism as consumers are emboldened to regurgitate belief to friends and neighbors and to call it fact.

Ezra Klein noticed a Fox News executive inadvertently copping to this slippery game in an interview given to Time magazine. Here's what Fox VP Michael Clemente had to say:

The fact that our numbers are up 30 plus in the news arena on basic cable I'd like to think is a sign that we are just putting what we believe to be the facts out on the table.

Here's what Klein had to say about that:

Most news organizations, in my experience, do not have to qualify the word "facts" with the words "what we believe to be." On the other hand, as Fox says, that model is good for ratings.

Facts for factions

A Pew survey finds 62 percent of Americans want the media to exercise a watchdog role over politicians. Meantime, only 29 percent of Americans think the media gets the facts straight - the worst result in over two decades of polling.

Partisan leanings account for some of the disparity. People allied with the party in power are much less likely to support watchdogs than those allied with the party out of power.

The media's increasingly fragmented and opinionated approach to coverage only amplifies this, as readers expect watchdogs to chase away the opposition. In this worldview, "facts" are whatever helps the watchdog get the job done - and like with members of Congress, people tend to like their own facts and dislike everyone else's.

The new news dialectic

In this age of well-trafficked digital social networks, two distinct types of news have emerged: the verified and the unverified.

Verified news is what traditionally has been printed on the pages of our newspapers and news websites and broadcast on the nightly news - fact-checked, reported impartially, presented in a coherent and contextualized manner, conveyed as a story of importance to broad segments of society.

Unverified news is what gets printed or broadcast on a variety of online and cellular networks and that also provides context and deals with issues of importance to broad segments of society.

Recently, and most notably with coverage of protests in Iran, the verified and unverified have been fused together on the websites and broadcasts of news organizations that would never have run the latter in the past.

From the New York Times:

“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later.

If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers. CNN showed scores of videos submitted by Iranians, most of them presumably from protesters who took to the streets to oppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election on June 12. The Web sites of The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian newspaper in London and others published minute-by-minute blogs with a mix of unverified videos, anonymous Twitter messages and traditional accounts from Tehran. ...

Many mainstream media sources, which have in the past been critical of the undifferentiated sources of information on the Web, had little choice but to throw open their doors in this case. As the protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad grew, the government sharply curtailed the foreign press. As visas expired, many journalists packed up, and the ones who stayed were barred from reporting on the streets.

The writer is partly wrong here: News organizations had a great big choice. Pretending the situation was nearly automatic is a cop out.

That doesn't mean that the news organizations made the wrong decision. Indeed, responsible news organizations can act as a useful filter on the open spigot of social networking. Short of being able to verify the flood of information coming out of Iran, news orgs are in a position to begin the work of verifying information publicly while providing important context.

The New York Times, for instance, still has a reporter in Tehran and has a team of editors with institutional memory, so it doesn't have to blindly repeat what it's seen and heard on Twitter updates and YouTube videos. The paper also has staff that can sift through the flood of updates to pick out what is relevant, and help determine sources who are reliable (old fashioned reporter's work).

Again, from the Times:

Even anonymous Internet users develop a reputation over time, said Robert Mackey, the editor of a blog called The Lede for The New York Times’s Web site, who tracked the election and protest for almost two weeks. Although there have been some erroneous claims on sites like Twitter, in general “there seems to be very little mischief-making,” Mr. Mackey said. “People generally want to help solve the puzzle.”

Readers repeatedly drew Mr. Mackey’s attention to tweets and photos of protests in the comments thread of the blog. Some even shared their memories of the geography of Tehran in an attempt to verify scenes in videos.

Over time, the impromptu Iranian reporters have honed their skills. Some put the date of a skirmish in the file descriptions they send. Others film street signs and landmarks. But the user uploads can sometimes be misleading. Last Wednesday, Mr. Mackey put a call out to readers to determine whether a video was actually new. A commenter pointed to a two-day-old YouTube version.

This kind of fact checking is important in this new dialectic between reader and news organization. It's also why it's wrong for news organization to see this kind of collaboration as inevitable. That's passive and short changes readers. Information may be coming more quickly and from geometrically more sources, but news organizations still have a responsibility to avoid becoming platforms for untrue or overly biased information. They should be gatekeepers worth subscribing to.