Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over
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DUKE UNIVERSITY Durham, North Carolina Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over Knowledge Daniela Flamini April 2019 Under the supervision of Prof. Catherine Mathers, Department of International Comparative Studies Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation with Distinction Program in International Comparative Studies Trinity College of Arts and Science Para Bea y Fidel 3 Contents ILLUSTRATIONS ..............................................................................................................................4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .....................................................................................................................5 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................6 INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1: THE POLARIZING TALES OF DE KIRCHNER VERSUS CLARÍN ................................. 21 THE INTERVIEWS................................................................................................................................ 25 INTERVIEW WITH WERNER PERTOT: JULY 9, 2018,; PÁGINA /12 ....................................................................... 25 INTERVIEW WITH SILVIA NAISHTAT: JULY 10, 2018, CLARÍN .............................................................................. 28 INTERVIEW WITH PABLO BLANCO: JULY 12, 2018, CLARÍN ................................................................................ 31 INTERVIEW WITH VICTORIA GINSBERG: JULY 13, 2018, PÁGINA /12................................................................... 33 REFLECTIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 35 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................... 39 CHAPTER 2: GETTING TO KNOW CHEQUEADO THROUGH GRAMSCI......................................... 45 THE BIRTH OF CHEQUEADO .................................................................................................................. 47 CONSIDERING GRAMSCI’S INTELLECTUALS .............................................................................................. 50 GETTING TO KNOW CHEQUEADO ........................................................................................................... 53 RELATIONSHIP TO TRADITIONAL MEDIA ................................................................................................. 63 MEASURING IMPACT............................................................................................................................ 67 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................... 73 CHAPTER 3: GLOBAL FACTS AND THE GOVERNANCE OF FACT-CHECKING ............................... 75 GLOBAL FACT V: THE GLOBAL INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE IFCN .......................................................... 77 PANELS: WHAT ARE FACT-CHECKERS TALKING ABOUT? ...................................................................................... 78 THE IFCN: PROFESSIONALIZATION AND REGULATION............................................................................... 85 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 91 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 94 3 Illustrations Figure 1: The homepage of Factcheck.org lists most recent articles. ............................................. 48 Figure 2: The homepage of Politifact.org lists most recent “fact-checks.” ................................... 48 Figure 3: Chequeado.com's navigation bar. .............................................................................................. 55 Figure 4: Clarín.com's navigation bar.......................................................................................................... 56 Figure 5: Página/12.com's navigation bar. ............................................................................................... 56 Figure 6: A bit of Abd and Corragio’s infographic in La Nación. ....................................................... 59 Figure 7: My version of Fernandez’s diagram, with added captions. ............................................. 72 Figure 8: A Maldito Bulo fact-check, with the word “Bulo” (hoax) stamped on a false Facebook post. ...................................................................................................................................................... 79 Figure 9: Politifact's Pants on Fire rating. ................................................................................................. 93 4 Acknowledgments To Catherine Mathers, without whom I would not have had the courage to take on this project. Thank you for the guidance, the laughter, the listening, and for believing in me before anyone else did; you have taught me how to love the world by studying it, and now I walk with your brilliant words, lessons and curiosity permanently etched in my being. To Phil Napoli, who lent me a generous amount of expertise, time and library books that provided the essential building blocks of this thesis. Thank you for the kindness, the spit- balling, the early meetings, the late emailing, and above all, the momentum and excitement you brought to my writing and research. To Bill Adair, Mark Stencel and the DeWitt Wallace Center for welcoming me to the journalism community at Duke with open arms and granting me a million opportunities to engage with what has now become my greatest passion. Thank you for the fact-checking adventures in Durham, Rome and Buenos Aires that have defined my undergraduate experience and made me truly feel at home abroad. To Pablo, Laura, Mati, and the rest of the Chequeado team, for hosting me in their office for two months and offering help with anything I needed. It was a pleasure and an honor to get to ache over football, munch on empanadas and live the Argentine news cycle with all of you, and this project is a tribute to the importance and vitality of the work that you do. To the Duke Center for International & Global Studies, the Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Duke Career Center, for providing me with research travel funding and generous institutional support. To el tío Esteban and mi costilla José, for being my family in Buenos Aires. Thank you for accompanying and guiding me as I fell in love with the city, its politics, its people and most importantly, its food. To the friends who never read the articles I send them but are now willing and excited to read my thesis, thank you for knowing when it matters. To my family, for everything. And to the fact-checkers, for the silver lining. 5 Abstract In news environments all around the world, journalists are frazzled about what they consider to be a deplorable state of the media. With large demographics of consumers having access to digital technologies and new methods of story-telling via social media platforms and the Internet, newspaper reporters of the past are finding themselves constantly having to catch up to a rapidly changing realm of knowledge-production. This thesis uses fact-checking as a lens through which to study the modern relationship between power, information, and the creation of narrative, and it is rooted in observations from my various engagements with fact-checkers in Buenos Aires and at an international conference in Rome. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘the intellectual,’ I examine how Argentina’s polarized political environment and clashing of class interests inspired the organic rise of Chequeado, a fact-checking organization committed to holding elite groups accountable to the rest of society by establishing a new kind of journalistic authority over knowledge-producing processes. Using my experience traveling with the Duke Reporters’ Lab to Global Fact V in Rome, I broaden this discussion to fit a globalized framework. In spaces where ideological battles wage and the very definition of reality is at stake, fact- checkers are vying for a narrower kind of authoritative power over the information that gets exchanged between classes, one that mobilizes the public to use their access to knowledge and counter hegemonic narrative. 6 Introduction In 1996, the word “objectivity” was dropped from the Society of Professional Journalist’s Code of Ethics, what press critic and media professor David Mindich described as “the closest document that American journalists have to a professional oath.”1 Mindich made note of this two years later, as he lamented how new trendy forms of media and news production were destroying traditional standards of journalistic integrity. According to Mindich, the increasing popularity of gossip and political scandals as well as the blurring of professional lines between politicians and journalists towards the end of the twentieth century signaled that “the line between the old guard and the tabloids is less clear than ever.”2 Even worse, daily newspapers and network news divisions across the country were on decline, allowing news cycles to become more consistently frenzied