The Production of Accountable Intersubjectivity in Magazine Fact-Checking

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Abstract

Magazine fact-checking originated in the 1920s as a bulwark against the costs of libel litigation, but it gained relevance over the course of the 20th century as the norm of objectivity came to putatively ground much of journalistic work. Today, the job of the fact checker is ostensibly to differentiate between true and false beliefs. In what amounts to a move back to the 1920s, I propose a framework for examining fact checking in terms of social accountability. If the job of a checker is to enforce consistency with the rule of objectivity as the empirical traces that a reporter collects undergo "translations" in the Latourian sense (e.g., from spoken conversation to quote), the checker has to be familiar with the way potential readers will be likely to evaluate the text according to their particular understanding of that rule, the better to predict possible readings. In service of writers (and editors) who wish to constrain the possible readings of their articles to the intended ones, a checker speculates about which components of a text might generate interest (i.e., stakes) in a certain type of reader, then methodically tests the response of each type of reader, usually by calling and asking whether the text accurately describes their understanding of reality. Assent signifies rule-consistency for that type of reader. Like a focus group, the process gives the editorial staff an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of their predictions of how a readership will respond, allowing them to repair areas where actual readings demonstrably diverge from intended ones. The truth of a published account results from accurate predictions of this sort, such that the published article never results in "reasonable" readings that have not previously been accounted for.

Author

• William Keats-Osborn, University of British Columbia