NiemanLab: “The Washington Post does it. So do The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, and The Daily Caller: fact-checking. In fact (no pun intended), fact-checking is so successful/important/sought after/self-reproducing (take your pick) that in 18 years, the number of fact-checking organizations has grown from one in 2003 to 349 worldwide in 2021, according to the Duke Reporter’s Lab. And while verifying what really happened — discerning between what’s true and what is not — is inherently tied to journalism, it usually occurs before journalists file their stories. Fact-checking, however, usually happens after the fact — so after something worthy of fact-checking happened. Fact-checking is often conducted by independent organizations, such as FactCheck.org or PolitiFact. But over time, more and more news organizations have also started doing their own formal fact-checks — thinking that this de facto journalistic genre of fact-checking can help keep misinformation at bay. To be clear, my prediction (or hope, rather) is about the news organization genre of fact-checking, not fact-checking as a whole…”