By Angie Drobnic Holan
Picture a world where evidence doesn't matter, where the loudest voices win, and where calling out falsehoods is seen as an act of bias. Welcome to 2025.
Donald Trump — the most fact-checked presidential candidate in history, because he’s spoken the most falsehoods — won the White House again. The social media company Meta, which owns Facebook, ended its third-party fact-checking program, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that fact-checkers are biased. Partisan podcasters and viral video snippets command attention, while the business models for longform journalism struggle. Public trust in news in the United States is at an all-time low, with growing news avoidance and declining page views.
If history has its eyes on journalism, it feels like a death stare. I know, because I've spent my career on journalism's fact-checking front lines — first as a journalist with PolitiFact since its founding in 2007, then as its editor-in-chief through three presidential administrations. Today, as director of the International Fact-Checking Network, I work with journalists around the world to promote high standards of accuracy.
I’ve been hearing more disillusionment lately, with fact-checking specifically and nonpartisan journalism in general: It’s not strong enough, it’s not confrontational enough, it just doesn’t “work.”
But fact-checking does work — just differently from how its critics suppose. The same is true of any type of fact-centered independent journalism.
Here’s how it does not work: Fact-checking can’t prevent individual politicians from winning or losing elections. It doesn’t knock on doors or get out the vote. It’s not persuasive to people who vote based on their cultural values or their pocketbooks. It doesn’t do the work that opposition parties and political movements are supposed to.
What fact-checking does do, and what it does well, is resist false narratives and prevent them from becoming entrenched. It holds the line on reality for history’s sake. It builds evidence-based records that can withstand political pressures. That’s why the politicians who seek to create their own realities are fighting so hard against fact-checking, and why they are now strong-arming tech companies and social media platforms into aiding them.
In my years of fact-checking, I've seen how this methodical gathering of evidence is journalism’s strongest defense against those who would invent and falsify claims for their own ends. Journalists working under repressive governments around the world understand this instinctively: Fact-checking isn't just about correcting the record; it's about preserving reality itself.
This rigorous fidelity to facts — to gathering evidence before reaching conclusions — is the true meaning of objectivity in journalism. It's not about being neutral or passive, but about being relentlessly committed to uncovering what's true and accurate. When democracy is under threat, this disciplined approach to truth-seeking becomes more crucial than ever. It's what distinguishes journalism from content production or social media commentary. We follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it challenges our own assumptions.
Remembering journalism’s history
As I've thought about how to maintain rigorous fact-checking in today’s charged environment, I keep coming back to journalists who've faced even tougher times. No one inspires me more than Ida B. Wells. In an era when false narratives justified horrific violence, Wells showed how meticulous fact-gathering could expose lies and challenge power.
A self-described crusader against lynching in the post-Civil War era, Wells approached her reporting by vigorously checking the facts of newspapers and law enforcement that were explicitly white supremacist. Her 1892 pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases” showed the injustice of lynching by digging deep into the particulars of case after case throughout the South.
Her reporting focused on false claims of Black men raping white women. More often than not, she found, these were cases of consensual interracial relationships that became known and that then triggered mob violence. Wells analyzed the dynamics of Southern whites trying to maintain political power after losing the Civil War, and she looked at how Black communities were torn over whether to challenge white power or accommodate themselves to it. She included factual points that didn’t perfectly support her arguments as a way to show she had fully and fairly considered the views of her opponents. Her moral arguments often centered on universal standards concerning the rule of law and civil rights that she argued should apply to all citizens.
Wells also argued that journalists’ first duty was to place true facts before the public. “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press,” she wrote… Continue reading IFCN director Angie Drobnic Holan’s full story in Nieman Reports, where it was originally published.
Defending the facts: How do journalists counter attacks on factual reporting
On Tuesday, Holan led a 42-minute discussion with NPR’s Eric Deggans and Politico senior managing editor Anita Kumar on the challenges facing factual journalism. They examined how polarization, declining trust, and misinformation shape public perception of the press—and how journalists can push back.
The conversation was part of Poynter’s National Advisory Board meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, where industry leaders gathered to discuss ways to strengthen journalism’s role in democracy.
Watch the full discussion here. |
