The site was also built as act of repentance. Mr. Lewittes describes himself not just as “creator, owner, founder and ‘Top Cop’” of the site, but as “a reformed gossip columnist who knows the industry inside and out,” and who worked previously at Access Hollywood, Us Weekly, The New York Daily News and The New York Post. He also did a stint at Star itself. The Gossip Cop masthead now lists only one other full time editor.
How Should Journalism Treat Liars?
Early on, the site drew skepticism for its methodology. Shortly after Gossip Cop’s debut, an editor at New York magazine wrote: “Publicist denials are not only boring, they’re meaningless. These are people who are paid to lie to protect their clients.” In 2012, the Columbia Journalism Review questioned the wisdom of Gossip Cop using anonymous sources to challenge rumors by other anonymous sources. Or, as Craig Silverman, the founder of Regret the Error and expert on corrections in media, put it, “How can we know that Gossip Cop’s ‘source’ is better than In Touch’s ‘Insiders’?”
But for the past two years, Gossip Cop has participated in events held by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (I.F.C.N.), whose signatories are required to undergo an extensive audit and adhere to a detailed code of principles. The company has updated its about page to reflect those principles. Mr. Lewittes has attended Global Fact, I.F.C.N.’s annual summit, for the past two years.
Being a verified signatory of I.F.C.N. is not particularly valuable by itself. It is, however, a “minimum condition” for becoming a third-party fact checker on Facebook’s News Feed, a position that carries with it incredible power. Facebook, through these verified parties, says it deeply limits the spread of stories deemed false, and removes accounts that are flagged for violating policies.
The quantity of false stories, these fact checkers said, is vast. Early on in this relationship with Facebook, fact-checking entities noted that there is no way for them to keep up with the high quantity of false or misleading information that circulates on Facebook.
There can also be questions, apparently, of just how factual a fact is. In September, The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine and Facebook-certified fact checker, rated as false an online essay about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s position on Roe v. Wade, possibly squelching that essay’s Facebook readership. The nature of the fact-check, which hinged on the literal and colloquial meanings of the word “said,” and the liberal politics of ThinkProgress, where the disputed essay appeared, unleashed a furious debate about Facebook’s role in refereeing, and suppressing, political commentary.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/style/gossip-cop-trump-stormy-daniels.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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