Check your Facts!

By Vedrana Simicevic, Andreas Rossbach and Lukas Rapp.

Many people don’t trust the media. Checking your facts is part of the job, but even more challenging when working cross-border.

In a 2020 poll across more than forty countries, researches from the Reuters Institute of Journalism found that less than four in ten respondents (38%) said they trust most news most of the time—a fall of four percentage points from 2019. Less than half (46%) said they trust the news they use at all.

One way that journalists can improve trust is ensuring content is fact-checked and verified properly to prevent the spread of misinformation. Fact-checking should be nonpartisan and transparent. Only then can it be a powerful instrument of accountability in journalism.

But, as if it is not complicated enough, fact-checking can be even more challenging during the cross-border collaboration process. This section runs you through some of the challenges your team might encounter, as well as tips on how to overcome them and tools you can use to make fact-checking easier.