Fact-Checking as a Basis for Media Literacy of Centenarians in Central Asian Countries (on the Example of Kazakhstan)

EasyChair Preprint 15824

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. 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. The lack of standards in this area leads both to a decline in the quality of materials, and to the publication of erroneous information or deliberate manipulation of data for various purposes, so the author offers his own view of fact-checking in data stories as a system of consistent multi-level verification.

Keyphrases: Central Asia, Kazakhstan, debunking, disinformation, fact checking, fake news

@booklet{EasyChair:15824,
  author    = {Almabek Ibraiymov},
  title     = {Fact-Checking as a Basis for Media Literacy of Centenarians in Central Asian Countries (on the Example of Kazakhstan)},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15824},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2025}}