Monday, June 9
This week, I’ll be participating in and reporting from the London School of Economics, where what’s believed to be the first international fact-checking summit in history is being held.
Why make an international case out of fact checking? After all, PolitiFact has been around since 2007, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker appeared in 2008, and the Annenberg Institute-affiliated FactCheck.org was launched in 2003. “Pinnochios” and “Pants on Fire” are part of the everyday lexicon of elections among U.S. voters and have been for years.
As Peter Cunliffe-Jones said in a recent blog item, a global gathering of fact checkers “doesn’t sound exciting. When I say it, it still sounds to me like the ‘World Conference of Actuaries.’ But believe me, it’s a lot more exciting than that.”
Cunliffe-Jones is head of AfricaCheck, an organization not even two years old but actually older than most of the non-U.S. fact-checking programs around the world. For those journalists in developing countries and regions in turmoil, checking the voracity of politicians and government is a new, difficult and sometimes even dangerous exercise. They’re not only looking for ways to staff their efforts and develop their fact checking – they’re trying to figure out how to do it without putting their livelihoods at risk.
Attending the forum will be journalists who work with fact checking in Ukraine, Egypt, Bosnia-Herzegovenia, Georgia, India and more. Topics on the agenda include discussions of training and best practices, tracking campaign promises, fund-raising and business models, and the growth and impact of fact checking.
And importantly, the summit — which is being produced with financial support from seven organizations — will help cement the crucial role of fact checking in democracies and emerging democracies.
Margo Gontar of the Ukraine’s StopFake project said it plainly in an e-mail to me: “Fake news can ruin lives and construct new reality. In this very way checking facts and uncovering the truth can save lives and open the eyes of people.”
Follow the conversation from London right here, and at #globalfact on Twitter.
This article was originally written for americanpressinstitute.org by Jane Elizabeth