Taking on Alternative Facts: The Rise of Fact-Checking Organizations in Response to a Surge of Fake News

A few years before the epidemic of disinformation broke out in the US media amid the 2016 presidential campaign, somewhat similar processes had taken place in a totally different institutional setting of the Russian media system. By 2014, the Russian state had seized financial and operational control over all the major broadcasters and many print and digital publications in the country. Yet, before 2014 the system of media control had been used predominantly defensively, for the ends of eliminating the competing viewpoints from the air and maintaining a controlled public discussion. This situation changed drastically following escalation of the standoff between Russia and the West that was triggered by Russia’s Crimea takeover and involvement in the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The need to secure public support for these operations and promote siege mentality in the face of international isolation prompted Russian government to launch an all-out propaganda offensive. The largest national-level TV channels adopted a new style of political coverage: assertive, boisterous, heavily framed, extremely slanted and loose with facts; the rest of state-owned and state-controlled media followed suit. One of the ways in which a public backlash against the new media reality manifested itself was the rise of new fact-checking and lie-debunking projects. This study examines the ways in which fact-checking becomes a civic response to a sudden shift in norms and practices of political journalism across two distinct media systems. I use the most-different-systems design to answer the following research question: what are the differences that a wider institutional context yields on fact-checking organizations as they respond to similar stimuli? Relying on a series of case-studies of the major Russian and American fact-checking projects and groups that were most active in the respective “post-truth” shifts of 2014 and 2016, I investigate the patterns of their emergence, organizational structure and procedures, and the impact that they make, as measured by the amount of coverage they receive. The findings of this research will become a step towards complementing the literature on comparative media systems with a fact-checking component.