It's A Crucial Election Year: Here Are Some Fact-Checking Tips

Media professionals face daily challenges in maintaining objectivity, impartiality, and balance in their reporting. But the true test of their professionalism often comes during the intense and high-pressure environment of contentious elections. 

During elections, ruling parties and candidates wrestle with a strong impulse to manipulate the media and control information, revealing the true extent of their commitment to democracy. During election cycles, it is imperative that the media relays all relevant facts, ideas, and opinions to citizens. 

Due to the prevalence of misinformation on social networks, politicians must provide legitimate access to the media and guarantee that citizens’ voices will be lifted above the political noise. Covering elections does also come with its own set of safety risks that journalists will need to assess, prevent, and reduce.

What To Fact Check and How to Stay Safe in the Process

Journalists can begin the fact-checking process by putting together a list that includes public figures, candidates, and media organizations to monitor, organized by relevant election topics such as policies and key issues. 

Using this structured method ensures that a journalist’s efforts are focused, enabling them to track the most influential voices and sources that shape public opinion. It’s not necessary to verify every single statement made. Journalists can save time by homing in on the information that will impact the public’s lives. The main objective here is to expose harmful misinformation and disinformation to hold public figures accountable for their statements.

Journalists can face threats if they are exposed while fact-checking. Exposure makes journalists more likely to experience online harassment, legal repercussions, or even physical intimidation. Starting the fact-checking process with a risk assessment can keep them protected, which should be a journalist’s primary concern. Threats to their safety will weaken the effectiveness of their reporting. Moreover, their focus will inevitably be fractured if they are worried about their own security.

Fact-Checking Tools That Journalists Can Use During the Election

MediaVault is a useful tool for journalists that frequently need to fact-check videos, images, and other media on social networks. There are many tools out there for this purpose, but MediaVault is helpful for those who struggle with preserving content for analysis since images and video frequently vanish from social media. Whether they are removed by the platforms themselves or deleted by the users, this tool can make content more accessible even after being fact-checked.

Google’s Fact Check Explorer helps journalists find fact-checks that have already been investigated by independent organizations worldwide. With this tool, journalists can more easily get to the bottom of the story while searching by image and text. Journalists sometimes find the fact-checking process for images difficult, having no easy way to find out if an image has been previously fact-checked by others. However, Fact Check Explorer supports this need with that feature and many others that Google continues to add to the service.

ClaimReview is dedicated to tackling the challenge of getting accurate information to spread the way the original claim did, once sources have been found and fact-checks have been published. It is a tool that fact-checkers use to tag their articles, making them identifiable by search engines and social media platforms like Google Search, Google News, Bing, Facebook, and YouTube. It usually takes about 30 seconds to use and journalists only need to enter a few basic details about the article, such as the person and claim being investigated and the piece’s corresponding URL.

These are just a few of the tools that journalists can use to make their lives a little easier during the election. These tools all continue to be updated, making them invaluable to media professionals. With these tools, along with other available resources and tips found online, journalists can help the public read between the lines of all of the misinformation we can come to expect this election cycle.