Fact-Checking, Then and Now

By Published On: August 23, 2010

New Yorker fact-checker Virginia Heffernan reflects on the state of fact-checking, both in the old days, as well as in the present day era of Google. She concludes:

In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.

CAMERA has long speculated on the impact of the new media’s looser guidelines on the old media’s more rigorous fact-checking process. Could this blending of old and new account for the New Yorker‘s failure to issue corrections on this 2009 story?

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