A Theoretical Perspective on the Issue of Standardization of Fact-Checking in Data Journalism

EasyChair Preprint 15823

Abstract

Investigative data journalism relies on data as a source and a tool for uncovering a story. The principles of working with data, searching, verifying, analyzing and data-storytelling differ significantly from traditional journalistic practices, but at the same time are an organic part of the journalistic material and the established standards and ethics of journalism. Fact-checking in data journalism is often reduced to mathematical verification of the correctness of data processing, with little attention paid to many other factors affecting the correctness and ethics of the text: the origin of the data, the methodology and motivation for their collection, the correctness of interpretation, the contextualization of the analysis results, and the correctness of data presentation in visualizations. The academic field studies epistemological differences of data journalism - the creation of forms of own knowledge and its acceptance by the audience under the influence of data-driven practices, and the complicity of the reader in the creation and verification of data-materials. At the same time, fact-checking in the field of data journalism is also seen only as a technological process of reconciling calculations, and not as a unified and systematic verification of journalistic material at all its levels, from technical to ethical. In this article, the author tried to fill the gap between the academic field and the practices of data fact-checking developed in newsrooms: existing methods of fact-checking in different editions were investigated, different approaches to assessing the reliability of data materials were considered, and existing gaps in data fact-checking were described.

Keyphrases: data journalism, debunking, disinformation, fact checking, fake news

@booklet{EasyChair:15823,
  author    = {Almabek Ibraiymov},
  title     = {A Theoretical Perspective on the Issue of Standardization of Fact-Checking in Data Journalism},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15823},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2025}}