The Watchdog Role of Fact-Checkers in Different Media Systems

The article aims to capture the diversity of emerging practices in fact-checking by exploring, on the one side, journalists’ self-perception of the watchdog role they believe to perform and, on the other, the effective occurrence of such a role in different media systems. Data regarding the perception of the watchdog role stem from the Worlds of Journalism Survey, whereas evidence concerning the presence of the watchdog function derives from a content analysis of 2,792 fact-checks published by FactCheck.org (United States), Pagella Politica (Italy), Correctiv (Germany), and Lupa (Brazil). While fact-checkers working for Correctiv rarely addressed declarations by political agents, those contributing to FactCheck.org prioritized verifying statements by former President Trump. In turn, Pagella Politica fact-checkers recurrently used assertive labels to stress the falsehood of public remarks, whilst “true” is the most used label in the Lupa case. There is correspondence between professionals’ conceptions about their role and the watchdog stance agencies perform in most cases. The manuscript also discusses how idiosyncrasies featuring each professional culture and specific traits of media systems influence fact-checkers’ work. Lastly, we hold that in some settings fact-checking may outline new frontiers for the notion of watchdog journalism, taking the journalistic voice to unprecedented levels of adversarialism.