When Truth Became Just Another Opinion

Fact checkers just could not help themselves

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

Meta’s decision to phase out fact-checking on its platforms is a significant milestone in the news media’s ongoing struggle for relevance and credibility. Mark Zuckerberg explained the move bluntly: “The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S.”

It’s a damning assessment, but not fully undeserved. Far too often, fact-checkers - and journalists dabbling in the practice - put their thumbs on the scale of contested issues. I first complained about this back in 2017, writing:

[P]roclaiming (or seeming to be proclaiming) incontrovertible truths on controversial issues is a different matter. The fact checkers may be compromised by their own view of the issue.

There will always be the temptation to short circuit debate by characterising subjective policy preferences as questions of fact.

And groupthink can also be a problem given the media is not ideologically diverse. This is something many journalists will openly admit is an issue. Those who do not are in denial of the empirical evidence they claim to love so much.

There are many examples of fact checks being misused to advance an agenda. Sometimes it is so overt as so be silly. Often the practice is more more subtle

I want to draw your attention to just two of them, one American and one local, that I have always felt exemplified the issues.

Did Obama oppose a law to ensure care for children that survived abortions?

In 2008, Politifact examined a claim that then-Senator Barack Obama had opposed the Illinois “Born-Alive Infants Protection” laws. These are designed to ensure that an infant who is born alive, even during or after an attempted abortion, is afforded the same legal rights and protections as any other living person. In other words, if the abortion fails to kill the baby, which is subsequently born, the state is required to provide care to ensure it does not die.

The answer was simple: Obama had, as a state senator, opposed various versions of the law multiple times

The central fact—that Obama voted against the bill—was indisputable. Yet Politifact appeared more interested in explaining away the vote than simply verifying the claim. So instead of stating the facts clearly, it buried the lead under a mountain of defensive context about why Obama had opposed the bill, offering justifications about its wording and its perceived implications for abortion rights.

This approach wasn’t fact-checking; it was advocacy. And it was an early indication of the fatal flaw in the fact-checking industry: the inability to separate facts from the broader political narratives surrounding them.

Did David Seymour get it wrong on the gender pay gap?

A 2020 Stuff article on the gender pay gap illustrates another common failing of fact-checkers: straying from the claim at hand. The fact-check was prompted by a statement from ACT Party leader David Seymour, who argued that job choices were the primary drivers of the pay gap, citing research by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin.

The only fact in question was whether Seymour had accurately represented Goldin’s findings. This is a straightforward task: review Goldin’s research and compare it to Seymour’s claim about the research. Instead, the article veered into a sprawling analysis of the pay gap, emphasising systemic discrimination and bias while critiquing Seymour’s framing and, by extension, Goldin’s findings.

The result? An editorial pushing back against Seymour’s worldview dressed up as a fact check. By failing to clearly answer the factual question—did Seymour quote Goldin correctly?—Stuff abandoned the core purpose of fact-checking. Readers were left with the impression that Seymour’s claim was wrong, regardless of whether it aligned with Goldin’s research.

Fact checking is not analysis

At its core, fact-checking is meant to be about verifying objective claims, not settling contested interpretations of the facts. Did Barack Obama vote against a bill? Did David Seymour accurately characterise a scholar’s findings? These are clear, testable questions.

Context is crucial, but it is often uncertain and contested. This is why, when broader explanations are necessary, they belong in commentary or opinion pieces, not fact-checks - or articles labelled as such.