The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, Second Edition

by Brooke Borel

This book will help
Recognize what information to fact-check
Identify the quality and ranking of source materials
Learn to fact-check a variety of media newspaper; magazine; social media; public and commercial radio and television, books, films, etc.
Navigate relationships with editors, writers, and producers
Recognize plagiarism and fabrication
Discern conflicting facts, gray areas, and litigious materials
Learn record keeping best practices for tracking sources
Test your own fact-checking skills An accessible, one-stop guide to the why, what, and how of contemporary editorial fact-checking.

Over the past few years, fact-checking has been widely touted as a corrective to the spread of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda through the media. “If journalism is a cornerstone of democracy,” says author Brooke Borel, “then fact-checking is its building inspector.”

In The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking , Borel, an experienced fact-checker, draws on the expertise of more than 200 writers, editors, and fellow checkers representing the New Yorker , Popular Science , This American Life , Vogue , and many other outlets. She covers best practices for editorial fact-checking in a variety of media—from magazine and news articles, both print and online, to books and podcasts—and the perspectives of both in-house and freelance checkers.

In this second edition, Borel covers the evolving media landscape, with new guidance on checking audio and video sources, polling data, and sensitive subjects such as trauma and abuse. The sections on working with writers, editors, and producers have been expanded, and new material includes fresh exercises and advice on getting fact-checking gigs. Borel also addresses the challenges of fact-checking in a world where social media, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse may make it increasingly difficult for everyone—including fact-checkers—to identify false information. The answer, she says, is for everyone to approach information with skepticism—to learn to think like a fact-checker.

The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking is the practical—and thoroughly vetted—guide that writers, editors, and publishers continue to consult to maintain their credibility and solidify their readers’ trust.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Reference, Politics, Philosophy, Journalism

245 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2023

Reviews

[Clover · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

An interesting second edition on fact checking. I agree wholeheartedly with the assertion in the introduction: It is always a good time to write about fact-checking.

This wasn't a topic that was ever really touched on in schools for me. Our AP English teacher did do a little bit on it, but it was nothing more than a brief portion of the class. I also see it's catalogued under 001.420285 and I rarely ever go to the 001 section. I thought I would see this closer to the 808's but it's a reminder to broaden my scope.

This isn't a massive book, so it's an easy reference to have on hand. You can flip through it as it does have a clear table of contents and index. I really liked the "Test Your Skills" section and believe all books need more hands on work in them to build confidence.

A great book to have in the library and it's a book I'll be needing to add to my own collection. Check your local libraries! Request they purchase it and put it on hold! It's always a good time to learn about fact-checking.

[Alan Johnson]

This second edition of Brooke Borel’s The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking was published on May 23, 2023. Although I have only read a few scattered pages of it so far, it appears to be very informative and helpful for readers, writers, editors, and professional fact-checkers.

[Jonathan]

This launched a good discussion, but wasn't the best resource for fact-checking in book publishing contexts.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking by Brooke Borel

I read the Second Edition (2023), which comes seven years after the original (2016), thus book-ending the Trump Administration. Borel's primary focus is on how to do internal ante hoc fact-checking: checking the work of an author or authors before publication, where the fact-checker is employed by the publisher. That's in contrast to external post hoc fact-checking: checking someone's work after publication, generally by an independent fact-checking organization not affiliated with the publisher. For a finished example of the latter, see Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020). For a short introduction to fact-checking, see the Wikipedia article.

As the book title suggests, Borel's focus is mainly on checking factual claims, as opposed to identifying, classifying, and analyzing an author's arguments (i.e., logic-checking). To learn how to do the latter, read some critical thinking textbooks, such as Critical Thinking: The Art of Argument. Borel writes very little about checking an author's arguments in support of the author's claims, but she does mention a bit about scientific argumentation, warning about p-hacking. If, like the author, you're going to be fact-checking articles by scientists, I recommend reading the book Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie. Ritchie details a number of hazards to be aware of. In particular see the replication crisis which has affected the field of psychology in particular. As the name "replication crisis" suggests, it's about findings in psychology and other fields that failed to replicate - that is, findings that other scientists working independently were not able to reproduce when they tried to repeat other scientists' experiments. The strength of a scientific finding increases as more scientists replicate the original studies. Even stronger confirmation comes from practical application of a finding, since a commercial product either works or it doesn't. For example, your smartphone relies on a long list of scientific findings for its operation. If any of that science is even a little bit wrong, your smartphone won't work. Thus you should be wary of scientific findings that are very new, haven't been independently replicated, and/or haven't led to real-world applications. Borel's advice is to ask some qualified scientists for their opinions when you can't check a scientific claim yourself, and that may be the best you can do. But as Ritchie's book points out, scientific claims differ in reliability.

The Second Edition seems to have come out just before public-facing AI large-language model chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini burst into everyone's awareness. Borel does mention AI tools for fact-checking but she's not too enthusiastic about the ones that were available when she wrote. If you spend a few hours chatting with the likes of ChatGPT, you'll probably decide to add AI to your fact-checking toolkit. AI isn't ready to fully replace the human fact-checker just yet, but AI can certainly augment the human, much as "traditional" search engines already did. In particular, these LLM chatbots have an uncanny ability to at least understand what you're asking, in contrast to traditional search engines that only respond to keywords. A keyword search may bombard you with pages of irrelevant results, particularly if your search keywords include common words with multiple meanings, and if one of those meanings is much more common than the one you want. With ChatGPT or Gemini you can usually explain what you want with a few sentences, and the chatbot gets you. And if it doesn't, you can refine your request with additional prompts and usually make yourself understood. However, even when the chatbot understands your question, it may still "hallucinate" i.e. produce incorrect responses. Thus you shouldn't take the chatbot's response as being definitive, at the time of this review. The chatbots will probably grow more reliable as more people use them, and their developers continue to refine them. Perhaps someday scientific experts will get credit for helping to train AI, much as they get credit for publishing traditional scientific papers.

I found a total of four of what I take to be errors or quasi-errors in the edition of the book that I read.

1. A reference lists the year 2005 when it almost certainly should be 2015 (the year that appears in the included link):

Thompson, Juan. “Retracted: Dylann Roof’s Cousin Claims Love Interest Chose Black Man over Him.” Intercept, June 18, 2005.

2. Not necessarily an error, but a style issue: the past tense of the regular verb "sneak" should be (or was until not long ago) "sneaked":

(though I take responsibility for any mistakes that snuck into the final text)

Enough people say "snuck" that it has become an "accepted" variant form, but I think this is bad because irregular verbs make English harder to learn. Lots of people are trying to learn English at any given time. Why punish them?

3. Borel refers to the placebo effect, seeming to downplay it as mere misperception:

Some magazines test products, too, but keep in mind that this is subjective— a positive result might be due to the placebo effect, that wily psychological trick that makes a product seem to work by sheer force of wishful thinking.

While many instances of placebo may be due to a person's changed perception of a medical condition, I believe there are some documented instances of persons registering actual physiological changes in response to placebo. For example, I saw a documentary in which elite cyclists were given a placebo and told it was a performance enhancing drug. Several of the cyclists then went on to post faster times in a time trial event. And they reported feeling subjectively faster and more capable while they were "on" the treatment. I suspect it takes more than just "wishful thinking" for an athlete's work capacity to measurably increase. It seems that the brain must somehow trigger biochemical changes in the working muscles or aerobic system.

4. Something of a technical error seems to have sneaked in via a quotation from someone else:

And beware of fakes. In some cases, an image might be of a real event, but used in the wrong context. For instance, in 2019, as wildfires ravaged the Amazon, several high- profile Twitter accounts posted photos that supposedly showed the devastation. Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer star, tweeted that “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen and its been burning for the past 3 weeks. It’s our responsibility to help to save our planet. #prayforamazonia,” along with a photo that was actually taken in 2013, in a different part of Brazil. Ronaldo has tens of millions of Twitter followers, and as of late 2021, his post had been shared on Twitter more than 100,000 times and liked nearly 375,000 times. And French president Emmanuel Macron, who has about 7.6 million followers, tweeted an actual photo of the Amazon rain forest on fire, but it was a stock image by a photographer who had died about sixteen years earlier. That particular post gained about 52,000 retweets and about 147,000 likes.

The paragraph is about fact-checking the authenticity of a photo, but Cristiano Ronaldo's claim itself appears to be incorrect or misleading: "The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen ...". Cristiano Ronaldo seems to be confusing "flow" with "stock" in a stock and flow problem. Earth's atmosphere contains a vast stock of oxygen which is in no danger of running out soon, even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn (and it probably will burn as human-caused global warming continues to tick up).

While the rainforest undoubtedly contains a vast number of photosynthesizing plants, which produce oxygen, they also consume oxygen when they die and decay. Thus it is more correct to say that the Amazon rainforest accounts for a sizable fraction of Earth's oxygen cycle, and it also represents a large stock of temporarily sequestered carbon in the form of biomass. Were the entire forest to burn, the threat would not be to "the world's oxygen" which would only decrease by a small amount, but rather from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which would add to the warming effect from humanity's fossil fuel burning and other sources of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary: The why, what, and how of fact-checking, with guidance on sourcing and record-keeping.

Any non-fiction work builds a story out of facts, whether a news piece, an opinion piece, a magazine article or blog post, a podcast, or a biography, or work of history. While a story reflects the narrative art of the writer, the integrity or truthfulness of the story depends on how solid is the foundation of facts. Fact-checking is essential, whether done by a writer, editor, or professional fact-checker, if indeed the integrity of the piece matters. Our “post truth” era makes this work all the more vital.

The Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing are key reference works for the publishing industry. In this work, Brooke Borel breaks down the why, what, and how of fact-checking. Borel’s experience is in the area of fact-checking for scientific publishing but she also is an award winning journalist and has been articles editor at Undark. The first edition of this work was released in 2016. Since then, the media landscape has drastically changed with new audio and video media, social media and the rise of AI. All these pose new challenges for identifying false information.

She begins with the question of why it matters. In addition to the importance of accurate information to our society, the reputations of writers and publishers depend on good fact-checking. In addition, when stories negatively affect the reputation of a person or organization, there are significant legal liabilities. Accurate facts backed by good sources and documentation mean the difference between huge damage settlements and vindication.

So, what facts ought one check? The short answer is everything. This includes the spelling of names and places, numbers and statistics, quotes, and even what one thinks one knows is true. The author includes a lengthy list. In other words, everything. Later, the author provides a sample story to fact check. The exercise is to identify everything to be fact-checked in a roughly 400 word article. Her answer key included 129 items!

Then, how does one go about this? She goes into the greatest depth with magazine articles, where dedicated fact-checkers are most often employed. The process includes reading, identifying sources, marking facts, triaging facts, tracking and documenting, reporting, and checking each version. She discusses how this varies with different media and how one works with books, where fact-checking is usually the author’s responsibility. She offers helpful ideas for navigating relationships with writers and publishers. While she doesn’t endorse being one’s own fact-checker, she recognizes that on many budgets, this is necessary and gives tips for doing it well.

Chapter four is a deep dive into the kinds of facts one may check and how one goes about it. She includes information on polling data, product claims, images, and sensitive subjects like trauma and abuse. She also offers counsel on litigious material and handling plagiarism. Chapter five builds on this, discussing primary and secondary sourcing, and evaluating the quality of sources. Finally, Borel discusses record-keeping, vitally important if someone subsequently challenges a fact.

Two other features add to the usefulness of this book. One is the “pro tips” interspersed through the text. The other is the “Think like a fact-checker” exercises throughout the text. This culminates with two exercises: identifying all the facts in a story (mentioned earlier) and going through a list of sources to classify them as primary or secondary and high or low quality.

I am one who both recognizes that discerning the truth in a set of facts is not always easy and that truth-seeking takes us on a asymptotic curve toward the truth. But this is only as good as the facts, the data we are working with. More than that, if being a truthful person, who lives with integrity matters, then facts matter.

What is humbling about this book is its honesty. What counts as a fact? Just about everything. Anything I assert or re-post on social media, anything I write on this blog, anything I teach in my church or advocate in the public square. And what about the things I read and watch? Will I always get it right? Probably not. But if I care about that, this book shows me the disciplined, rigorous work of learning to think like a fact-checker. It all comes down to neither believing nor being a party to promoting lies. It all comes down to wanting to live truthfully.

[EditingWithEmily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me question everything — in the best way.

It’s full of practical advice for anyone looking to add fact checking to their repertoire. Particularly useful is chapter 4, which covers how to check different types of facts, from basic facts and polls to product claims and headlines.

Borel’s steps to fact checking are follow. And her advice about building relationships with sources is essential reading, especially as her recurring advice is ‘ask an expert’.

This book might seem like overkill for editors because we don’t typically act as fact checkers to the extent covered in the guide. But we do:
🌶️make sure the physics of spicy scenes work
📏check that distances measure up
🤨query a story that sounds too good to be true.
So this guide will help editors do the fact checking part of our jobs more thoroughly.

Lastly, I’m utterly in love with the cover.