Journalists are often considered the defenders of truth. Despite this, though, fact-checking has really only entered the mainstream in the past decade. It could simply be that before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, people trusted that people were going to tell the truth as much as possible. The 2016 election has shown that this is not necessarily the case. Perhaps the greatest cause for the rise of fact-checking is that it’s reassuring to think that politicians cannot simply lie and get away with it anymore.
In “How the Global Fact-Checking Movement is Changing How We Train Journalists,” Michael W. Wagner writes about how fact-checking is going beyond being a fad, and is now an integral part of journalism. The article—co-authored by Lucas Graves who recently wrote the book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism—looks at what makes journalists fact-check, and whether it really has an effect on audiences. I won’t spoil either of those answers here, however.
The article also mentions that Graves and Wagner are launching a course this month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which will create a new fact-checking site called The Observatory. But, if you happen to want to take a course about this but don’t go to UWM, the Center for Applied Liberal Arts offers Research and Fact-Checking. The class is online and self-paced, and it covers everything you could want to know about fact-checking. And if we keep getting candidates like the ones this year, you will definitely want to know about fact-checking.
