The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, Second Edition

Brooke Borel is an award-winning journalist and the articles editor at Undark. She is the author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World, and her writing has appeared in Popular Science, BuzzFeed News, the Guardian, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, among other outlets.

"Over the past few years, fact-checking has been widely touted as a corrective to the spread of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda through the media. While political fact-checkers focus on the claims of public figures, their editorial counterparts check stories being readied for publication for a wide range of errors, from inaccurate names and dates to false quotations and misleading descriptions and interpretations of data. If journalism is a cornerstone of democracy, says author Brooke Borel, then fact-checking is its building inspector. In this second edition of her guide to the why, what, and how of editorial fact-checking, Borel covers the evolving media landscape, with new guidance on checking audio and video sources, polling data, and sensitive subjects such as trauma and abuse. She has expanded the sections on working with writers, editors, and producers and added new material on getting fact-checking gigs as well as new exercises. And she addresses the challenges of fact-checking in a world where social media, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse are making it increasingly difficult for everyone--including fact-checkers--to identify false information. But the answer, she says, is for everyone to approach information with skepticism--to learn to think like a fact-checker"