The Professional Fact-Check Is Dead

The dedicated “fact-check” outfit is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.

The crisis of professional “fact-checking” is not new. For more than 15 years, observers have watched with alarm as the genre degraded itself for the benefit of petty partisan politics.

Yet little has been written about the discipline in its present state. Its original raison d’être long discarded, it lingers now as a zombie, ambling aimlessly in pursuit of mindless satiation.

Take Snopes, that relic of the early web that once existed to dismantle viral myths and spare the public from conspiracies, humorous hoaxes, and harmful falsehoods.

Recently, it sought to calm concerns that the late Dolly Parton might have done something nice for Jews.