Legacy media fail to fact check Trump’s ‘border czar’ on sex trafficking
For months, millions of people who watch Fox News have been told they’re living in a dystopian society in which the horrific scourge of sex trafficking has increased by a whopping 600% over the past four years.
If only the rest of the media did anything to fact check him. When Homan made this same claim on CNN in a December interview, the network did not question or challenge him. Given all of CNN’s resources, it’s hard to blame much smaller operations like a local TV station spreading Homan’s claim on social media. Even when Homan repeated this to lawmakers in testimony this month, somehow no one in the “legacy media” seems to have fact checked it.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors