The Great Fact-Check Debate

The numbers: The number of active fact-checking sites in North America dropped from 94 to 90 between 2020 and 2023, according to new data from Duke Reporters' Lab. (Axios)

• While fact-checking sites increased globally by 140% between 2016 and 2022, the trend has since leveled off.

Context: Republicans have long accused the fact-checking industry of being biased against them, including this 2024 cycle during the presidential and vice presidential debates.

Bubba’s Two Cents

In theory, fact-checkers are just impartial arbiters of the truth, calling balls and strikes and serving up, well, the facts. But that’s not how things work in practice because fact-checkers are human, and like all humans are vulnerable to biases, errors in judgment or incompetence. For instance, fact-checkers and fact-checking websites can’t possibly fact-check every claim that’s put out there by politicians or other political figures. So they need to make decisions on which claims they think are interesting or newsworthy enough to fact-check. There’s a huge margin for bias introduction there. Then there’s the times where they just plain get stuff wrong (which happens more often than you’d think). We all remember when the fact-checkers told us the coronavirus lab leak theory was a debunked conspiracy theory, right?