The Emergence and Development of News Fact-checking Sites

Abstract

This study analyzes the emergence, development, and stasis of the news fact-checking website through the institutional perspectives of population ecology and institutional logics. The population ecology approach suggests that like other new media forms, fact-checking sites will mimic one another in pursuit of legitimacy, and this will encourage formation of media “populations,” and tendencies to buffer the external environment and stabilize. Over time, these sites will respond more to other sites within the population itself than to changes in the immediate environment. However, the institutional logics approach accommodates conflict and agency, suggesting that entities pursue complex strategies to retain legitimacy when faced with conflicts within the wider institutional environment. The fact-checking site is a product of such a strategy, as it straddles both traditional journalism and digital network logics. Findings show evidence of a budding fact-checking site population, increasing legitimacy, and increased isomorphism. Yet findings also reveal fragmentation and diversity in recent years, suggesting that institutionalization processes are complex and uneven. Findings suggest a need to understand that media entities are shaped by both their exogenous environment and their endogenous “population,” a collective of similar entities. Future research should explore the conditions that lead to one or the other being more consequential.

KEYWORDS:

• emerging media
• fact-checking websites
• institutional theory
• isomorphism
• legitimacy
• media logics
• media routines
• population ecology

Notes

1 In his discussion of institutional approaches, political scholar Liam Stanley (2012) distinguishes analytical frameworks (like institutional approaches) from theoretical frameworks: “Historical institutionalism does not claim, nor does it need to claim, to be able to explain all change that modern states are going through” (477). “An analytical framework doesn't aim to reflect political reality, and should not be assessed on its ability to do so. They do of course contain … ontological assumptions. However the purpose of ontological assumptions in political science is not to best represent the political world [as does a theory], but help categorise and reduce its inherent complexity” (476).

2 Given the rate of change on the internet, it is likely that some were missed, but the results approximate a population of US fact-check sites at the time of study.

3 Measuring mimicry via similarity with practices of prominent organizations in a field is common in institutional work (e.g., Deephouse 1996).

4 Content analysis of media's mentions of organizations is a prominent way to operationalize legitimacy within institutional scholarship (Deephouse 1996; Scott 2008).

5 Following pilot tests on three articles, the researcher and a graduate student conducted an intercoder reliability test on 15 randomly selected articles, or approximately 10 percent of the sample, resulting in Kappa coefficients of more than 0.85 for all measures.

6 There were few such organizations in 1992–2003.

7 Likely, there were more mortalities, as some sites went offline and did not make it into the sample gathered here—a limitation of the study.

8 Both measures of legitimacy were shifted to create a three-month lag so that legitimacy scores were correlated with density numbers that came three months later.