RTDNA President-CEO Dan Shelley says TV news’ credibility is on the line in this election year as never before, and he has some advice on how stations can recapture viewers’ trust. A full transcript of the conversation is included.
The momentum behind organizations that aim to combat online falsehoods has started to taper off.
The fact-checking unit has seen surging subscribers on its YouTube and TikTok channels since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, and it’s using a variety of tools like RevEye, InVid, Google Maps and the Internet Archives Wayback Machine to debunk mis- and disinformation on the conflict.
The online fact-checker, is retracting 54 stories and has suspended its cofounder after looking into accusations of plagiarism against him. David Mikkelson used a pseudonym, his own name and the Snopes byline to publish the pieces.
Nearly 30% of the fact-checks published by these two television channels for the Whatsapp chatbot have been original stories, rather than translations.
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TVN’s Newsroom Innovators | As Elections Near, TV’s Fact-Checking Surges
Broadcasters, including CBS, E.W. Scripps, Hearst, Tegna and Graham Media, are bolstering their fact-checking operations as the 2020 election looms closer, partnering with outside groups like Politifact, FactCheck.org and First Draft to ensure their own trustworthiness with local viewers.
Fact-Checking An Increasingly Fruitless Task
More and more, fact-checkers seem to be trying to bail out an ancient, rusty and sinking freighter with the energetic use of measuring cups and thimbles.
The epidemic of misinformation helps Tegna check the box with new audiences. “Our audiences are consuming news and local news in a way that they never have before, where their lives literally depend on it,” says Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s VP of news. “They are desperate to find somebody without an agenda, without spin to take some of the things that are out there and help them be smarter about what’s true and what’s not true.”
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order intended to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for what gets posted on their platforms, two senior administration officials said early Thursday. Such an order, which officials said was still being drafted and was subject to change, would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples. It’s almost certain to face a court challenge.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Twitter of “interfering” in the 2020 election after it fact-checked two of his tweets pushing conspiracies about voting by mail.
The coronavirus has halted most of the globe, but there’s one movement it has fueled — media literacy. In India, the United States and Brazil, fact-checking and media literacy organizations are training citizens to confront the new coronavirus “infodemic.”
As many parts of the journalism world shrank, fact-checking grew. According to the 2019 Duke University Reporters’ Lab census, 44 fact-checking organizations existed five years ago; there are 195 now.
With manipulated videos looming as the next big disinformation disruptor, The Washington Post is expanding its role in “accountability journalism,” launching a new platform for fact-checking manipulated video content. “The Fact Checker’s Guide to Manipulated Video” launches today with tools for and identifying and labeling various forms of online video manipulation.
In a nearly 2,000-word blog post sent to Poynter on Wednesday, Facebook announced a slew of new things it’s doing to combat false news stories, images and videos.
A Duke University team expects to have a product available for election year that will allow television networks to offer real-time fact checks onscreen when a politician makes a questionable claim during a speech or debate.
This year, more than 20 new fact-checking projects launched around the world. Grants were awarded, partnerships took form and governments tried to fight fake news. And here at the International Fact-Checking Network, we’ve ramped up our coverage of fact-checking and misinformation in order to better inform journalists around the world. This year we published 132 stories ranging from new fact-checking outlets in countries like Zimbabwe, to White House officials’ use of the phrase “alternative facts.”
In one day, Snopes received more than $500,000 worth of donations from nearly 20,000 people on GoFundMe in order to keep its doors open. Snopes intends to use the money to cover its basic operating expenses, including staff salaries.
People who search for a topic in Google’s main search engine or the Google News section will see a conclusion such as “mostly true” or “false” next to stories that have been fact checked.
Facebook has started rolling out its third-party fact-checking tool in the fight against fake news, alerting users to “disputed content”. The site announced in December it would be partnering with independent fact-checkers to crack down on the spread of misinformation on its platform.
Univision’s new Detector de Mentiras (Lie Detector) is the first U.S.-based Spanish-language fact-checking project. The network launched the fact checker during Wednesday night’s Democratic debate.
Local and national media, including ESPN, SI.com, CBS and USA Today, reported in recent months about one Lennay Kekua, a now-proven-to-be-fictional Stanford student whose untimely death in September inspired her boyfriend, University of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o, to play in her honor as the team reached the NCAA football championship game. While keeping up the sports journalism tradition of creating heroes, journalists at dozens of news organizations, media critics say, fell short of their duty to check facts independently.
