The fact-checking imposture

In our media universe saturated with information, “fact-checking” is sold to us as a lifesaver. A promise of pure, objective truth. But I don’t believe in it. It’s even, in my view, the worst thing that has happened to journalism, and here’s why.

The mirage of objectivity

What I fundamentally reproach fact-checking for is its display, its pretension to validate “facts” in a neutral manner. It presents itself as an impartial arbiter that would sort truth from falsehood. However, this posture is a lie. The way a verification is conducted is always, and inevitably, eminently subjective. The simple choice of subject to verify, experts or witnesses to question, data to retain is already a partial act, oriented by a preexisting point of view. Impartiality doesn’t exist. Everything is partial, it’s very important to be aware of this. To claim a unique, “objective,” “scientific” truth, let’s know that it’s necessarily lying, that is, manufacturing acceptable truth. This is what George Orwell describes very well in his dystopian novel 1984, written in 1948: the Ministry of Truth’s role is to constantly rewrite history and facts to conform them to the Party line.

When we observe their arguments closely, we realize that these fact-checkers do like everyone else: they have an opinion and look for what will corroborate it. They don’t do anything else, but they claim the opposite. The problem is not subjectivity per se, but the denial of this subjectivity. This hypocrisy particularly depresses me. It manufactures lies while adorning itself with the virtues of truth. It’s indeed a kind of “Ministry of Truth” that doesn’t speak its name, an enterprise that, under the pretext of enlightening us, imposes a worldview on us without ever assuming it as such. This approach is all the more dishonest as it denies the very nature of information.

Moreover, philosopher Gilles Deleuze had well documented what media information is, in a 1987 conference (full quote in the article Presence against the calm crowd. For him, information is not communication but injunction, it’s a system of slogans that tells us what to think. “Information is the controlled system of slogans that are current in a given society”. Fact-checking is the culmination of this system: it doesn’t invite us to think, it orders us to believe.

Also, philosopher Jacques Derrida said in essence from the 1960s that “every text is produced in an interpretation, and it’s this interpretation that gives meaning to the fact.” It’s therefore an abuse of authority to present as univocal what is in reality, always, a cultural and ideological construct.

Rediscovering point of view, a quest for honesty

I admit to having a touch of nostalgia for the era when newspapers assumed their political line. We knew that Libération was on the left, that L’Humanité represented the communist party, that Le Figaro defended conservative positions and that Le Monde was center-left (we’re so far from that today, while Le Monde has become a sort of argued advertising screen for triumphant capitalism and villainous Macronism). There was therefore an honest “reading contract.” The reader knew the point of view from which they were being spoken to and could thus sharpen their own critical mind. It was moreover common to read several newspapers to forge one’s own personal point of view. Who does that today? Anyway, it’s almost the same information in all press organs, dominated by the logic of the present, which relay the same AFP dispatches as quickly as possible, in order to be the first to capture the audience.

Today, the generalized hypocrisy that consists of masking economic and political interests behind a veneer of objectivity seems much more pernicious to me. Most major media have sunk into partial and hypocritical pseudo-truth, often unconscious among journalists themselves, eaten away from within by their dependence on the financial powers that own them.

I therefore plead for a return to journalism that fully assumes its subjective dimension and its biases. Journalism where authors sign their articles and engage their personal responsibility. Journalism that presents argued points of view rather than supposed objective truths. Journalism that trusts the critical intelligence of readers rather than dishonestly chewing up the work of reflection for them.

I prefer, by far, to read a book written by a historian, sociologist or philosopher who explicitly gives their point of view, even if it’s situated, partial, subjective. Because at least the author doesn’t pretend to be neutral. They reveal their positioning, inscribe themselves in a tradition of thought, and the reader can then position themselves accordingly. The author doesn’t claim to deliver “the truth” to me but their understanding of events, nourished by their research, reflections, intellectual journey. This intellectual honesty seems infinitely more precious to me than the pretensions to objectivity of fact-checkers.

Similarly, when someone points out an interesting article to me, I can read it with the necessary critical distance, knowing that it’s a point of view among others. This mediation by a third party introduces this salutary “step aside” that allows not being caught up in the urgency and emotion of immediate current events.

Information is never neutral. It’s always the product of a gaze, a selection, a formatting. Recognizing this reality means restoring dignity to journalism and respecting public intelligence. It’s also escaping this “lie factory” that fact-checking has become, this imposture that consists of passing off opinions as facts and partial judgments as universal truths.

Receiving so-called “hot” information a week later changes absolutely nothing in my life. On the contrary, it protects me from this devouring energy of the instant, this obligation to react urgently. I prefer to anchor myself in longer temporalities, those of reflection and analysis, which are for me the only ones capable of producing truly free thought. It’s a deliberate choice to preserve my capacity to think for myself, far from slogans.

I don’t reject wholesale the idea of verification, nor the necessity of exposing gross lies. But I believe we must break the illusion that fact-checking would be direct access to reality. It doesn’t offer a truth, only one construction among others.

What I defend, fundamentally, is the necessity of nuance and plurality. Reality never reduces to a validated line or a red cross on a screen. What threatens democracy is not so much the circulation of divergent opinions as the pretension of a discourse to embody “the” ultimate truth.

Preserving oneself from symbolic violence

In my eyes, the problem doesn’t only reside in the method, but also in its social and political usage. Fact-checking has taken an enormous place in public space, to the point of becoming an instrument of marginalization. The one stamped as “fake” or “erroneous” finds themselves downgraded, sometimes ridiculed, without questioning the relevance of the critical work that led them to this status.

The most troubling thing is that this process passes for protective, democratic, a guardian against disinformation. But in reality, it manufactures symbolic violence of a new type: if one is designated by a fact-checker as a propagator of “false information,” our discourse is immediately relegated to the field of the unacceptable, lies, the extreme right, anti-Semitism, or other, in short, judged as dangerous for the community. And this media tribunal will have sanctioned without any contradictory debate.

This culture of unique truth and “right thinking” therefore generates terrible symbolic violence. It demonizes any divergent opinion and creates enemies where there should be debate. This violence, although muffled, is no less harmful than the explicit violence it claims to combat. It’s the violence of the “right-thinking,” who, under cover of good intentions, stigmatize and exclude.

A personal story allowed me to understand the depth of this violence. A former companion of my mother, a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II, once confided something to me that seemed incomprehensible for a long time. He told me that upon their liberation, they had been made to parade, emaciated, on trucks crossing cities, under banners saying “Never again.” He said to me: “That was worse than what I experienced in the camp”. In the camp, despite the absolute horror and the tattooed number, he could still exist as a subject, capable of hatred, love, resistance, even if it meant risking his life. On that truck, he was nothing more than an object, a symbol used, instrumentalized to serve a political affirmation, however just it might be. He was totally dispossessed of himself. The “good people” had humiliated him more in one day than his torturers had done in several years.

Today, I understand what he meant. It’s precisely what I feel faced with the permanent injunction to fear and indignation, whether faced with Trump’s election or the rise of the extreme right. This collective moral panic dispossesses us of our capacity for analysis. It locks us into emotions that prevent us from thinking calmly and building something positive. So my energy, I choose to put it elsewhere, in the patient construction of my own path, and not in sterile revolt against a system I cannot change. I prefer to preserve myself to remain a thinking subject.