“A partisan divide in the reception of fact-checking.” A new report from the Duke Reporters’ Lab by Rebecca Iannucci and Bill Adair, written up by Poynter’s Alexios Mantzarlis, gives us more evidence of something we already knew: Conservative sites are way more likely to call fact-checking biased.
The Duke report notes that while fact-checkers take pains to assert their independence,
Those disheartened by the way that U.S. media organizations covered the 2016 election likely long for the American equivalent of the BBC: a large, publicly funded broadcast organization free of the commercial pressures that made Donald Trump a permanent fixture of news programs in the year leading up to his victory.
But not even the BBC approach is free of its challenges, as Helen Boaden, a former BBC News and BBC Radio director, writes in a new paper for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. While the BBC is massively well-funded, and built on impartial coverage, its role in the U.K. media environment exposes it to some unique challenges. The same goes for news organizations in the U.S., whose applications of free market principles to news has become both an asset and liability.
In October 2015, I gave a speech to international journalists in Germany called, ‘Newspaper lies can cost lives.’ Less than a year later, Britain voted for Brexit, with one of the main reasons cited as ‘too many migrants’. How did such a fear and dislike of migrants develop? Newspaper lies played an enormous role. Video; 14 minutes:
Innovation everywhere. Innovation in the news business. Innovation in social media. Innovation (and creative destruction!) in presidential political communication. Innovation in the topics and methods of scholarly research. Innovation as a keyword and a buzzword. Innovation as an ideology and a sign of the times.
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