Boundaries Not Drawn

Abstract

The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializes in debunking political misinformation. A growing occupational movement, originating in the United States but increasingly international in scope, has sought to legitimize fact-checking as unbiased journalism, to establish common standards and practices, and to secure reliable funding for this emerging genre. As a genuinely transnational professional movement which includes practitioners from multiple journalistic cultures as well as other fields, fact-checking offers a new site to consider whether and how professional journalism is meaningfully becoming globalized. This paper models a novel approach to mapping a diverse organizational landscape in terms of institutional ties to the fields of journalism, academia, and politics. Drawing on fieldwork from two international gatherings of fact-checkers, I array fact-checking outlets on a ternary graph and review their competing understandings of the mission, the target, and the practices of fact-checking. I highlight areas of convergence as well as divergence in this organizational milieu, focusing particular attention on boundaries not drawn—the willingness of professional journalists in this global movement to share jurisdictional authority with non-journalists. I conclude with suggestions for a comparative research agenda focused on this emergent area of practice.