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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias.

Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...

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And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence.

Do the following exercise.

In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.

Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.

It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.

Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc.

A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

No, the fact checkers exist to pick their sponsors' preferred sides when there are multiple sources. They have little or no actual expertise of their own but the mere terminology leads the uninitiated observer to directly believe that the "fact-checked" view is objectively true. Everyone else is forced to do the constant rhetorical work of re-explaining why fact-checkers are not what they purport to be.

>A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.

When a newspaper makes sure its reporters aren't inventing stories, it's basically North Korea. Got it.

I can't tell if you are serious or if this is just a god-tier straw man but it's all wrong. If I didn't find it so damn annoying, I'd call this response a fact check. First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees. Maybe if some of the employees are supposed to play the part of controlled opposition, it might happen. But fact-checkers exist to discredit information from other sources. Secondly, fact-checkers were used as a pretext for silencing people all over social media. This happened extensively in the West, including in the US, and many politicians still crave the power to deanonymize and silence their opposition under the pretense of misinformation or hate speech. Finally, people can decide for themselves who is credible, and nobody is trustworthy enough to decide for everyone what is true. That even goes for most so-called objectively knowable information. The importance of having a free market of ideas is perhaps proportional to the tendency for people to lie or misrepresent the facts. People are not as stupid as the proponents of fact-checking would have you believe.

> First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees.

It's a totally normal job at newspapers, magazines, and the like. You can easily find such jobs, and the publications themselves write about it:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/the-history-of...

That is a little interesting but those are not the fact-checkers I'm talking about, nor the ones that the post is talking about (since they mention tech companies). Don't hold me to that. Maybe there is some overlap because working for a media outlet might count as a credential in the eyes of the people who appointed them to work in social media. In any event, so-called fact-checkers were used as a pretense to censor social media and silence contrarians. I obviously have no problem with legitimate researchers, especially if their job is internal to particular news agencies so that they can avoid lawsuits for libel or whatever.

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