Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over Knowledge

Napoli, Philip

Mathers, Catherine

Flamini, Daniela

2019-05-15T17:33:17Z

2019-05-15T17:33:17Z

2019-04-15

International Comparative Studies

In news environments all around the world, journalists are frazzled about what they consider to be a deplorable state of the media. With large demographics of consumers having access to digital technologies and new methods of story-telling via social media platforms and the Internet, newspaper reporters of the past are finding themselves constantly having to catch up to a rapidly changing realm of knowledge-production. This thesis uses fact-checking as a lens through which to study the modern relationship between power, information, and the creation of narrative, and it is rooted in observations from my various engagements with fact-checkers in Buenos Aires and at an international conference in Rome. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘the intellectual,’ I examine how Argentina’s polarized political environment and clashing of class interests inspired the organic rise of Chequeado, a fact-checking organization committed to holding elite groups accountable to the rest of society by establishing a new kind of journalistic authority over knowledge-producing processes. Using my experience traveling with the Duke Reporters’ Lab to Global Fact V in Rome, I broaden this discussion to fit a globalized framework. In spaces where ideological battles wage and the very definition of reality is at stake, fact-checkers are vying for a narrower kind of authoritative power over the information that gets exchanged between classes, one that mobilizes the public to use their access to knowledge and counter hegemonic narrative.

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18565

en_US

Journalism

Knowledge production

Fact-checking

News

Argentina

Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over Knowledge

Honors thesis

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