LEAVING HOME TO COME HOME: REBUILDING JOURNALISTIC GATE-KEEPING ONE FACT AT A TIME

Confusion about modern post-publication fact-checking is dissipatingas the practise nears its 20th anniversary in the United States (where it began in earnest),and misinformation settles as a resistant and sometimes deadly drag on reality. But anuanced analysis of fact-checking’s role in and on the journalistic field (Bourdieu, 1993,1998; Benson & Neveu, 2010) is troubled by such independent characterizations of posthoc claim verification as: a revolt against journalism; a professional or social reformmovement; a new genre; an entrepreneurial exercise; a status-seeking ploy; and/or apsychologically ineffective or damaging reinforcement of falsehoods. Given that accuracy isan ethical requirement of normative journalism and the defining characteristic of ‘news’(hence the political duplicity of the oxymoronic term, ‘fake news’), the birth of independentfact-checking troubles the practice of journalism and, by proxy, political knowledge, andcan thus also be read as critique of the field writ large. While gatekeeping (Lewin, 1947)is assumed dead, and gate-watching (Bruns, 2003) on life support, modern fact-checkers arenevertheless culling and privileging information, while simultaneously adjudicating andassigning blame for public speech, which traditional ‘neutral’ journalism avoids. Using bothboth academic and journalistic qualitative and quantitative interview tools, and framed byfield, gatekeeping/watching, and discourse theories (thus emulating thejournalistic-academic hybrid model deployed in fact-checking), I examine the largelyunexplored area of journalistic re-entrenchment and introduce the reverse-gate-keepingtheory of ‘information corralling’ in the era of escalating misinformation.