Fact-Checking Methodology and its Transparency: What Indian Fact-Checking Websites Have to Say?

ABSTRACT

Among other preventive measures, fact-checking is considered as one of the effective ways to combat fake news. Fact-checkers promote rationality and assist citizens in making informed decisions. However, fact-checkers’ motives, methods and abilities are doubted and subjected to distrust. Lack of perceived trust is a major concern in the profession of fact-checking journalism. To build public trust, fact-checking organisations have been advised to be transparent about news production processes. Besides the trust mechanism, compliance to transparency is an important tenet of journalistic professionalism. This study seeks to analyse Indian fact-checkers’ explanations of their methodology for fact-checking claims and commitments to ensuring methodological transparency. Qualitative content analysis of declarations published by seven Indian fact-checkers on their websites demonstrates that fact-checking is conducted in a systemic and transparent manner. Transparency norm seems to have emerged as a governing principle in the context of fact-checking journalism. The findings of this study have been interpreted in the view of literature on journalistic transparency.

KEYWORDS:

• Fact-checking methodology
• fake news
• IFCN code of principles
• Indian fact-checkers
• journalistic professionalism
• transparency
• trustworthiness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE 2020 Report: https://images.assettype.com/afaqs/2021-06/b9a3220f-ae2f-43db-a0b4-36a372b243c4/KANTAR_ICUBE_2020_Report_C1.pdfhttps://cms.iamai.in/Content/MediaFiles/7d9fac50-7cac-43df-93c9-0cf34fb52403.pdf.

2 Duke Reporters’ Lab: https://reporterslab.org/fact-checking (Last accessed on August 10, 2021).

3 Signatories to IFCN Code of Principles: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/signatories (Last accessed on August 10, 2021).

4 IFCN Code of Principles: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/know-more/the-commitments-of-the-code-of-principles.

5 This study is limited in its scope due to convenience sampling. Findings of this study are applicable to the selected fact-checking websites only. This research does not claim for generalisation of its findings to other fact-checkers in the Indian context.