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Fact-Checking Journalism and the New Ecology of News

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Fact-Checking Journalism and the New Ecology of News Deciding What’s True: Fact-Checking Journalism and the New Ecology of News Lucas Graves Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2012 Lucas Graves All rights reserved ABSTRACT Deciding What’s True: Fact-Checking Journalism and the New Ecology of News Lucas Graves This dissertation studies the new class of political fact-checkers, journalists who specialize in assessing the truth of public claims — and who, it is argued, constitute a professional reform movement reaching to the center of the elite US news media. In less than a decade this emergent genre of news has become a basic feature of political coverage. It figures prominently in national debates and commands the direct attention of elite political actors, who respond publicly to the fact-checkers and dedicate staff to dealing with them, especially during electoral campaigns. This study locates fact-checking in a wider practice of “annotative journalism,” with precursors in the muckraking tradition in American news, which has come into flower in an online media environment characterized by promiscuous borrowing and annotation. Participant observation and content analysis are used together to examine the day-to-day work of the news organizations leading the fact-checking movement. This approach documents the specific and forceful critique of conventional journalistic practice which the fact-checkers enact in their newswork routines and in their public and private discourse. Fact-checkers are a species of practical epistemologists, who seek to reform and thus to preserve the objectivity norm in American journalism, even as their daily work runs up against the limits of objective factual analysis. In politics, they acknowledge, “facts can be subjective.” Fact-checkers are also active participants in an emerging news ecosystem in which stories develop, and authority is constructed, in patterns of citation and annotation across discursive networks of media and political actors. This study demonstrates how attention to these media-political networks subtly informs and constrains the work of producing objective assessments of factual claims. And it suggests that the objective status of the fact-checkers themselves can be seen as a function of their position in media-political networks, reproduced in formal and informal partnerships and, most immediately, in the pattern of outlets which cite and quote and link to them. This perspective helps to account for the surprising limits of the political critique offered by professional fact-checkers, who argue for a more honest, fearless journalism but carefully avoid the largest and most controversial political conclusions that emerge from their own work. In seeking to redefine objective practice for a changed media environment, the new genre of fact-checking underscores the essentially defensive nature of what has been called the “strategic ritual” of journalistic objectivity. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction … p. 1 Chapter 1 - From Free Software to Fact-Checking … p. 26 Chapter 2 - Annotative Journalism and the Practice of Objectivity… p. 70 Chapter 3 - The Elite Fact-Checkers: Finding Facts to Check … p. 119 Chapter 4 - The Elite Fact-Checkers: Deciding What’s True … p. 169 Chapter 5 - The Elite Fact-Checkers: Making a Difference … p. 226 Conclusion … p. 290 Bibliography… p. 295 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project like this incurs many debts before it’s done. This dissertation could not have come together, first of all, without the generosity and transparency of the fact-checkers who gave me a window onto their professional world. I’m grateful to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, to Brooks Jackson and Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org, and to everybody at the national bureau of PolitiFact — most of all Bill Adair, whose initial “yes” set all of this in motion. This manuscript benefited immeasurably from the comments, large and small, of my dissertation committee: Todd Gitlin, Victor Pickard, Stephen Reese, Michael Schudson, and David Stark. I return to the discussion at our midsummer meeting over and over as I think about carrying this work forward. I owe a profound thanks to two committee members who have guided and inspired me at Columbia in a way I hope one day to emulate. David Stark bridges intellectual worlds like few others in or out of academia, and never fails to ask the question that casts everything in a new light; his interest, advice and support have been invaluable. Michael Schudson has been the ideal advisor, patient and wise, always knowing more than he says and saying precisely what’s needed. I hope this dissertation reveals the influence of his thoughtful and respectful scholarship, which I admire more every time I return to it. I received valuable support and feedback from David Stark’s CODES seminar and from many friends in the Sociology department, which became a second home intellectually and actually; thanks especially to Monique Girard, Elena Krumova, Olivia Nicol, Alix Rule, and Josh Whitford, a constant ally to graduate students. The Mellon Graduate Fellows program at ISERP provided the best possible environment to finally put pen to paper for me and many others, due ii in no small part to the efforts of Bill McAllister and Bethany Kell. James Chappel, Seema Golestaneh, Seung-Jeung Kim and Sonali Thakkar were valued companions in our subterranean lair. The New America Foundation supported this research at a crucial stage, and hosted the fact- checking conference that figures so prominently in the final chapters. Many people and organizations contributed to that conference and to the research agenda that grew out of it, which continues today. I’m grateful in particular for the efforts of Steve Coll, Kate Fink, John Kelly, Brendan Nyhan, Lori McGlinchey, and most of all my friend and colleague Tom Glaisyer, who puts people together like no one I’ve ever met. My friend Rasmus objects to the word “community,” but he would agree we’ve had a fine one in the small PhD program in Columbia’s journalism school. On our remarkable faculty, each of whom has helped and influenced me, I owe special thanks to Andie Tucher and Frank Moretti, whose support and confidence made the difference when it counted. Herb Gans, whose research erected the platform for this and so many other studies of journalists at work, offered penetrating comments on this manuscript. Among many fellow PhD seekers who shared and shaped my long arc in our program, Chris Anderson, Jonah Bossewitch, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Ruth Palmer, Soomin Seo, Julia Sonnevend, and Madiha Tahir have all been indispensable allies and friends. I owe special thanks, and many quarters, to my neighbor, colleague and co-conspirator Joost van Dreunen. Many others have contributed ideas, criticism and material support to this project at various stages. Peter Asaro, Chris Anderson, Katherine Brown, Biella Coleman, Christina Dunbar- Hester, Ruth Palmer, Laura Portwood-Stacer, Annie Rudd and Julia Sonnevend all read drafts of iii early chapters. Olivier Sylvain shouldered more than his share of a side project neither of us had the time for. Jack Bratich offered many encouraging words, and drinks. David McNally helped to turn me into a coder, for a summer at least. Rich Garella, Omar Serageldin, and Ranjit Singh were uncommonly gracious hosts during frequent trips to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Ingrid Erickson lent me her beautiful Harlem aerie for the mad final weeks. And the deadline would surely have been missed if not for the editing and illustration talents, and limitless patience, of my mother Janice Olson. I’ve been lucky to have the constant support and indulgence of an extended family in New York — Janice, David, Jessie, Alan — who heard more dodges and evasions than any of us can remember to the question, “So what’s your dissertation about?” Finally, I owe more than I can possibly say to the person who bridges all of these worlds, my best friend, constant interlocutor and finest role model, whose subtly totalizing worldview informed this project at every stage. Thank you, Christina, for showing me how to do this. iv 1 Introduction This dissertation is about the fact-checking movement — what a journalism review has called “The Fact-Checking Explosion” — in American news.1 It examines a set of emergent practices, and an accompanying journalistic discourse, which have coalesced into a reform movement reaching to the center of the elite news media. The largest question this project tries to address is this: How has the Internet — not as a technological force, but as a complex of affordances rendered meaningful by new practices, norms, and organizations — transformed journalistic work and the world of news production? The new actors and behaviors studied here will also, I think, reveal deeper currents in the practice of journalism and its defining professional norm. Reform movements have complicated beginnings. As we shall see, professional fact-checkers trace the roots of their new genre to a style of reporting that emerged, in fits and starts, two decades ago. But a fair date for the birth of fact-checking as it is practiced today is December 9, 2001. As discussed in the next chapter, on that day just two months after September 11 an irate conservative blogger issued what would later be seen as a call to arms against the mainstream news media: It's 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass.2 The phrase quickly became part of Internet lore. It would be repeated thousands of times as a kind of shorthand for the animosity between blogger-journalists and their professional counterparts. As a New Yorker piece on the 1 Carey Spivak, “The Fact-Checking Explosion,” American Journalism Review, December/January 2011. 2 Ken Layne, “More Funny Fisk, from Sept.
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