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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

When Fact-checking renews Information Technology and Journalism: an Epistemological Approach

Résumé

This contribution is a theoretical account in epistemology of journalism through case studies, to tackle the problem of disinformation phenomena in the journalistic field in Europe. We hypothesize that media design fact-checking technologies and develop new practices to reduce the uncertainty that characterizes information, its value and its use in the democratic debate. The epistemological investigation addresses the presuppositions, approaches, methods and logical reasoning used in journalism to develop specifically quality journalism and to minimize mis- and dis-information through fact-checking. We will examine three examples of fact-checking technologies and practices, to underline their epistemological issues and assumptions. We discuss our results through a theoretical framework that integrates metajournalistic discourses (Carlson, 2016), philosophical theories (Hearns-Branaman, 2016) and media studies. These three examples of fact-checking are the set of tools proposed by the fact-checking project of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) EUfactcheck, by the French TV media Les Observateurs de France 24, and by the non-governmental organization First Draft. They are part of a European media environment characterized by its "information disorder" (Wardle, 2018), and by the weakness of the journalistic gatekeeper role as a consequence of the “twin technological disruptions of mobile and social media” (Digital News Project 2020), but also by a loss of power of journalists and editors over the information produced (Ekström & Westlund, 2019). Some philosophers evoke a “weakness of true” (Revault D'Allonnes, 2018) or a broader context of a "post-truth" era (Ferraris, 2019; Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017). So the competition between reliable information and misinformation and disinformation would create a situation of uncertainty in which the information consumer - the citizen- would become quite incompetent to distinguish the true from the false. As a result of these phenomena, the information production process is changing. Driven by new reception practices and encouraged by European Union public authorities, media cannot simply produce meaningful content, they must also publicly demonstrate that they produce quality information to rebuild public’s trust in the media. Can we consider the case of fact-checking technology as a symptom as well as a response to this media disorder and this uncertainty? The fact-checking process, which are supposed to identify, reduce or even eliminate uncertainty, present two major issues: epistemological in relation to the underlying approach, protocols, technics adopted, and roles assigned; and political: these measures, encouraged by the public authorities, are considered essential for our democracies, as we saw during the last European elections. Is the reduction of uncertainty really the prerequisite for rebuilding public’s trust in the media?
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hal-04507624 , version 1 (16-03-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04507624 , version 1

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Angelina Toursel, Philippe Useille. When Fact-checking renews Information Technology and Journalism: an Epistemological Approach. The 25th Annual International Conference on Information Technology and Journalism: “Internet in the Era of Disin-formation, Journalism and Artificial Intelligence”, Interuniversity Centre Dubrovnik, Sep 2020, Dubrovnik, Croatia. ⟨hal-04507624⟩
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