Maybe you can handle the truth. But can you verify it?
When I first started out in journalism as a 17-year-old, I had never heard of fact-checking. Since the 2016 U.S. election, fact-checking has grown into its own dedicated field. Newsrooms sometimes even hire fact-checkers to go over daily stories, feature articles and, especially, investigative stories.
According to Duke University’s Reporter’s Lab, fact-checking websites grew from 11 in 2008 to 424 in 2022 worldwide.
Fact-checking is a rigorous process that includes going through interview transcripts, reporter’s notes, government documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests and other important materials to make certain a journalistic piece of work is factual and accurate.
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