Fact-checkers in an Age of Epistemic Instability
The project researches journalistic fact-checking, offers critical reflections on the current practice and works with fact-checkers to improve the practice through action research. The project asks fundamental questions like: What is a fact? How can we check them? What is the journalists' role in this?
University of Copenhagen, department of communication. The TMT project worries about the current epistemic instability and acknowledges that journalists should play a key role in contributing to the stabilisation of a shared, solid knowledge foundation—as this is crucial for being able to discuss the development and common decisions in democratic societies. At the same time, the project is critical towards the existing ontology and epistemology of fact-checking practices. To discuss and nuance such understandings, the project draws on rhetorical argumentation theory and rhetoric of science as resources for understanding how facts are brought about and established and sometimes dis- and reestablished through argumentation by different actors in different contexts. Through such insights, the project aims to foster constructive ways of joining the political conversation and guide fact-checkers to be more aware of their role and communicative practice. In this endeavour, the project work with national and international fact-checkers and arrange workshops for media institutions.
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