How Fact-Checking Went Global: Mapping an International Movement in Professional Journalism

• In Event: International/Transnational Journalism

Abstract

The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializes in debunking political misinformation. This paper traces the shifting boundaries and definitions of fact-checking that have accompanied the growth of that movement. I model an approach to mapping the worldwide fact-checking landscape in terms of institutional ties to the fields of journalism, academia, and politics. I consider effects that this internationalization has had on the US fact-checking movement. And drawing on fieldwork from two international gatherings of fact-checkers, I survey competing understandings of the mission, the target, and the practices of fact-checking. As a genuinely transnational professional movement which includes practitioners from multiple journalistic cultures as well as other fields, fact-checking offers a new site to study the question of whether and how professional journalism is meaningfully becoming globalized. I conclude with suggestions for a comparative research agenda focused on this emergent area of practice.

Author

• Lucas Graves, U of Wisconsin - Madison