Fact-Checking Can Be a Political Act

When politicians use barefaced lies as a loyalty test, journalists have a duty to hold them to account

"liar liar" by alexa fades away is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A post from a QAnon supporter made a splash a couple of months ago. She said that all her posts about Donald Trump allegedly winning last year’s US presidential election and the imaginary preparations to hold a violent coup and imprison his opponents were getting flagged by Facebook’s fact-checkers. She asked how to turn fact-checking off. Someone noticed and shared her post with her name blanked out and it soon generated a lot of discussion among skeptics. It seemed to capture something of the spirit of the times.

Fact-checking should be uncontroversial. There’s an old joke among journalists that if someone tells you it is raining, you should open the window and have a look. The news media is built on an assumption of good faith. Politicians will spin, exaggerate, twist and tell the odd lie, but their narratives tend to be grounded in the real world, to a greater or lesser extent. This is why the media found it so hard to cope with Trump’s 2016 campaign or the beginning of his presidency. He is a populist, who thinks that he alone embodies the will of the people. He is also a conspiracy theorist, who seeks to build narratives around his gut instincts. Combining both tendencies means that he is extremely uninterested in fact-checking his views. In fact, telling barefaced lies can act as a loyalty test.

How is the media supposed to react to this? We have seen that the time is right to update some of the old-fashioned assumptions that exist in the news media. When populists see lies as a loyalty test, formal neutrality is no longer enough. Towards the end of Trump’s presidency, many publications began to become more unapologetic about calling out his lies. Doing so inevitably created a backlash among his supporters, who accused the media of being biased. Instead of getting defensive about this criticism, journalists should nod our heads. We are indeed biased against lies, propaganda and speculative narratives. We are also biased in favour of inconvenient facts. In times like these, fact-checking is a political act. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is.

My personal experience backs up this point nicely. Since 2005, I have lived in Barcelona. I specialize in breaking news about Spanish companies behind a paywall. While I don’t write much about politics, it does provide a backdrop to the worlds of finance and business that I cover closely, so I keep an eye on it. I like to share news stories about Spain and elsewhere on my Twitter feed, combined with a little light commentary on current affairs.

Barcelona is the capital of the autonomous community of Catalonia; and Catalan nationalism has long been a dominant force in the politics here. As far back as 1948, the great writer George Orwell noticed that “indifference to reality” was a defining feature of nationalism in general. Around 2012, Catalan nationalism took a populist turn in the middle of a long recession. The movement gained traction with the region’s Catalan-speaking minority. It soon built itself into a frenzy of paranoia about Spain and the region’s Spanish-speaking majority, while indulging in wishful thinking about the chances of becoming independent and hysteria about the opposition. This peaked with a failed attempt to create a new state in 2017.

During these explosive times, I did what I saw as my duty and fact-checked some of the nationalist narratives on Twitter. No, Spain isn’t a fascist state; actually, 48% isn’t a majority; and I’m very sorry, but constitutions don’t cease to be valid just because some members of society no longer accept them. If anyone wants to look deeper into this issue, I would recommend reading Articles 1, 2 and 92 of the Spanish Constitution and looking into the Catalan parliament’s outrageous “disconnection law” of 2017, which didn’t receive nearly enough coverage in the international media at the time.

The result of my modest fact-checking on Twitter was frankly insane. Every time I tweeted about the issue, my notifications blew up with hostile comments from true believers and an army of Russian-funded bots. Many critical commentators found the attention so painful that they stopped tweeting about the Catalan independence movement. I have a stubborn streak; and I also think that journalists have a duty to hold elected officials to account. I continued.

The insanity just got worse and worse. I was regularly accused of fascism (untrue), of being in the pay of the Spanish government (I regularly criticize the national government as well) and told to sell my home and move elsewhere (no, thank you). Carles Puigdemont, the regional leader who declared that he no longer had to obey the Spanish Constitution or judges (let alone parliamentary rules, the Catalan statute of autonomy or electoral laws), found my tweets so irritating that he blocked me on Twitter. He later ran away to Brussels after it emerged that the whole affair had been a bluff. In 2018, a Spanish newspaper ran an article about one of my Twitter threads, which fact-checked nationalist propaganda.

Since then, the situation has come off the boil, but continues to simmer. Twitter finally began to crack down on bots in 2018. The platform also introduced controls to limit who comments on tweets in 2020. Taken together, both changes have made life easier for internet critics of populist nationalism, who no longer have to deal with a barrage of frenzied and misinformed commentary every time we question the narrative. The Catalan nationalist parties collectively did better than the unionist parties in a regional election in February, amid widespread abstention due to the pandemic, but they are divided between three very different parties and they have yet to form a government. The movement is split between pragmatists, who want to regroup, and fanatics, who are worried that if Catalonia doesn’t become independent soon, it never will. It is also split between the right and those who think that nationalism can be progressive or left-wing (I am unconvinced myself). The fault lines run deep. so it is difficult to see any easy solutions.

If you have enjoyed today’s blog post, please subscribe so you can get free updates every week. Any shares on social media would be gratefully received. Finally, here is the link to my critical-thinking rabbit hole, including Sharpen Your Axe, a free book to popularize a probabilistic approach to current affairs. See you next week!

Update (8 May 2021)

News broke as I was sending this post that ERC, a relatively pragmatic and left-leaning Catalan nationalist party, would seek to form a minority government in the days ahead. Please follow me on Twitter for further updates in English.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.