In recent years, long-standing concerns over the standard of public political debate and public engagement have escalated. Commentators in the US and the UK have perceived a cultural shift, popularly labelled âpost-truth politics,â whereby the truth matters less than âtruthinessâ (a term attributed to US satirist Stephen Colbert)âthe things you already believe or wish to be true. However, it remains to be seen whether the Trump presidency represents a new era in American politics or a temporary anomaly, and we should certainly be cautious about generalising this trend across the Atlantic. Several British journalists have written books on the topic, with the notorious falsehood from the EU referendum Leave campaign that the UK sends ÂŁ350m to the European Union (EU ) every week prominent in their case for a British post-truth politics. However, this misrepresentation of statistics has a long history in the UK, as elsewhere, and is not in the same realm as Trumpâs âbullshittingâ and âalternative factsââthat is, having a complete disregard for the truth, and outright making things up.
Nonetheless, reservations about the novelty of problems with the facticity of political communication, and especially news reporting, should not lead us to be complacent about those problems. As a result of several decades of increasingly sophisticated professionalised political communication, alongside cuts to news budgets, journalists have found themselves more and more dependent on politiciansâ public relations (PR) professionals, or âspin doctors,â and resorted to hyperadversarial âgotchaâ journalism to compensate for this loss on control by leaping on gaffes, splits and u-turns (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). But as valid as this form of account-holding might be (Schudson 2008), it does little to inform the public on substantive policy issues.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, journalistsâ own attention is focused on the threat of democratised communication via social media and other digital technologies (such as deepfakes), and see professional journalism as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. There is certainly a case for arguing against the techno-optimism of the previous decade, in which scholars such as Clay Shirky (2009) argued that we need not worry about the decline of journalism because everyone is now a journalist, but that simply reinforces the importance of strengthening journalism in the face of budget cuts that produce churnalismâa light rewriting of press releases and other puffery. Of course, editorial distortion is also a key factor: research has shown that misinformation about British politics circulated on social media originates primarily in the tabloid press (Chadwick et al. 2018). Not unrelatedly, there has been a consistent decline in public trust in both established politics and mainstream media (Edelman 2019; Newman et al. 2018).
However, whilst journalists worry that audiences are being wilfully stupid in trusting social media, transnational surveys indicate that social media is trusted even less as a source of news than the mainstream media. Indeed, it could well be that rising media literacy has left citizens rationally sceptical and distrustful, but with no rational means of distinguishing fact from fiction and distortion other than instinct, partisan allegiances and other heuristics . Furthermore, in an age of personalised politics, we are encouraged to rely on heuristics such as trust to select political leaders. Politicians and journalists alike assume that voters are not interested in policy and bored by details, but they cannot then blame voters for voting on a less rational basis.
A key heuristic for audiences is consistency with existing beliefs. Again, this is not a recent developmentâthe psychological notion of reducing cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) is over 60 years old, and the first media reception research found that media coverage of election campaigns âreinforces more than it convertsâ (Berelson et al. 1954). At a time when there was concern about assumed strong media effects, it was reassuring to find that the audience (or at least, an engaged minority that were paying attention at all) were not passive recipients of media messages, but in recent years political polarisation and the resurgence of populism across Europe and North America, as well as Latin America, has generated panic about that same motivated reasoning . However, reason, and especially political conviction, cannot be separated in any meaningful way from values (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), and there is no reason why strong political convictions should impede rational engagement with well-evidenced facts.
In this context, fact-checking journalism is a timely and optimistic development, and an idea that has caught on around the world (Graves 2016; Graves and Cherubini 2016; Singer 2018). It is not a panacea, however, and its contribution to reasoned debate and effectiveness will vary considerably around the world. Nonetheless, detailed analysis of the practice is overwhelmingly focused on the US, where the practice originated (Graves 2016; Graves et al. 2016; Uscinski and Butler 2013; Amazeen 2015, 2016; Amazeen et al. 2015; Gottfried et al. 2013; Fridkin et al. 2015; Lowrey 2017; Nyhan et al. 2013; Nyhan et al. 2019), although studies have been conducted on France (Barrera et al. 2017) and Africa (Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill 2018), but not on the UK, even though Channel 4âs FactCheck was among the first imitators of FactCheck.org.
This study therefore aims to supplement that valuable existing literature with a British perspective, by closely examining the election output of the three main national fact-checkers: Channel 4 FactCheck, BBC Reality Check and independent fact-checker, Full Fact. It takes as a case study the 2017 snap election, called following a change of leader at the helm of the governing Conservative Party following the EU referendum vote, and a perceived opportunity by new leader Theresa May to increase her majority. This election is particularly interesting in terms of fact-checking, because May sought to contest and expected to win it handsomely on personal credibility, but lost her majority, in no small part on policy. The rest of the current chapter will set out the concerns about the quality of political debate in the UK since the Brexit vote, before elaborating on the emergence of British fact-checking journalism, and the political context for this research.
Post-Truth Politics?
The claim that the UK sends ÂŁ350m per week to the EU has gained notoriety, alongside leave-supporting MP Michael Goveâs controversial assertion that the British public had âhad enough of [unreliable economic] expertsâ. This figure was the gross UK contribution before the rebate (after which it would be ÂŁ276m according to Reality Check) and subsidies received by the UK (so the effective figure is around ÂŁ161m, net). However, the authors acknowledge that the more representative figure was equally damaging and that the remain campaign chose to contest the vote on other grounds rather than contest it (Ball 2017; Davis 2017; dâAncona 2017). Since the correction was not advanced by a prominent public figure, most utterances of the claim went unchallenged. These authors largely pin blame, however, not on the campaigns or the media reporting, but on the public.
BBC journalist, Evan Davis (2017: loc 4152) cites opinion polls showing that more people thought the claim true than false, even though that âthe media had challenged the claim on numerous occasions.â He doesnât substantiate that latter claim, or give examples. A Nexis search of UK national newspapers during the campaign period indicates that pro-Remain newspapers, the Guardian and Independent, debunked it, and other broadsheets at least reported disagreement over...