Deciding what's true
Subtitle: the rise of political fact-checking in American journalism
By: Lucas Graves
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780231175067; 9780231175074
Subjects: Objectivity; Journalism; Journalistic ethics
Description: Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. As these journalists are the first to admit, in a hyperpartisan world, facts can easily slip into fiction, and decisions about which claims to investigate and how to judge them are frequently denounced as unfair play.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The landscape of fact-checking. Introduction ; Ink-stained fact-checkers ; Objectivity, truth seeking, and institutional facts; title: The work of fact-checking. Choosing facts to check ; Deciding what's true ; Operating the truth-o-meter; title: The effects of fact-checking. Fact-checkers and their publics ; The limits of fact-checking; title: Epilogue.