Fact-checkers will win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. “The prize is meant to recognise the tireless work of all the journalists who sought the truth,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee will say. “In an age of unprecedented misinformation, the fact-checkers have exposed the world’s liars in powerful new ways.”
The committee will note that fact-checking is no longer just a niche form of journalism but now a key part of everyday news coverage. “Fact-checkers are now the backbone of global reporting,” the committee will say.
Hollywood will start production on Seeking the Truth, a film starring Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron as courageous journalists who run a nonpartisan fact-checking site. They discover that shadowy forces are spying on them and rummaging through their past to try to pressure them about a fact-check on Medicaid expansion. The Pitt and Theron characters believe the rating should be Pants on Fire, but in a meeting in a dark alley, a mysterious representative of the shadowy forces says it should be Mostly False. The movie will co-star Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly but supportive publisher.
Taylor Swift will release “Get the Facts,” the first pop song to celebrate fact-checking. (“Lost my way / Couldn’t find the truth / Scoundrels on TV and Twitter / Liars are so uncouth / Liii-iiii-arrs are soooooo uncouth”). Swift will donate her earnings from the song to the International Fact-Checking Network. She will perform “Get the Facts” during halftime at the Super Bowl, with 69 dancers representing the 69 journalism organizations that have signed the International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. The dancers will wear tasteful costumes with big check marks. Aerosmith will also be there.
Also in 2020, tech companies will dramatically expand their use of fact-checking. Facebook, Google, and YouTube will append fact-checks to ads by politicians and will take unprecedented steps to demote false content. Politicians and partisans will complain, but the companies will say it’s important to empower democracy. Twitter will make the shocking move of putting red checkmarks on the faces of politicians who earn lots of false ratings. The company will provide a $10 million grant to fact-checkers to fund their work.
Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will each launch nightly fact-checking shows. Unlike the cable channels’ other programming, the shows will truly be non-partisan, with actual journalists instead of pundits. The shows will even call out exaggerations and falsehoods by their own hosts and commentators. The fact-checking programs will earn double the ratings of the partisan shows.
The infusion of money from Taylor Swift and Twitter will pay for a historic surge of fact-checking just in time for the November election. The money will create something of a space race at the local level, as TV stations, public radio, newspapers, and nonprofit news organizations mobilize to check politicians at all levels. Media companies will put aside their rivalries and share content.
Politicians will notice. In campaigns around the country, there will be fewer exaggerations and falsehoods. Politicians will try to out-do each other by bragging about their good records for Pinocchios and Truth-O-Meter ratings. Voters will go to the polls in November with an extraordinary understanding of what was true and what wasn’t. Some of them will be humming “Get the Facts.”
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the Knight Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.
Fact-checkers will win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. “The prize is meant to recognise the tireless work of all the journalists who sought the truth,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee will say. “In an age of unprecedented misinformation, the fact-checkers have exposed the world’s liars in powerful new ways.”
The committee will note that fact-checking is no longer just a niche form of journalism but now a key part of everyday news coverage. “Fact-checkers are now the backbone of global reporting,” the committee will say.
Hollywood will start production on Seeking the Truth, a film starring Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron as courageous journalists who run a nonpartisan fact-checking site. They discover that shadowy forces are spying on them and rummaging through their past to try to pressure them about a fact-check on Medicaid expansion. The Pitt and Theron characters believe the rating should be Pants on Fire, but in a meeting in a dark alley, a mysterious representative of the shadowy forces says it should be Mostly False. The movie will co-star Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly but supportive publisher.
Taylor Swift will release “Get the Facts,” the first pop song to celebrate fact-checking. (“Lost my way / Couldn’t find the truth / Scoundrels on TV and Twitter / Liars are so uncouth / Liii-iiii-arrs are soooooo uncouth”). Swift will donate her earnings from the song to the International Fact-Checking Network. She will perform “Get the Facts” during halftime at the Super Bowl, with 69 dancers representing the 69 journalism organizations that have signed the International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. The dancers will wear tasteful costumes with big check marks. Aerosmith will also be there.
Also in 2020, tech companies will dramatically expand their use of fact-checking. Facebook, Google, and YouTube will append fact-checks to ads by politicians and will take unprecedented steps to demote false content. Politicians and partisans will complain, but the companies will say it’s important to empower democracy. Twitter will make the shocking move of putting red checkmarks on the faces of politicians who earn lots of false ratings. The company will provide a $10 million grant to fact-checkers to fund their work.
Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will each launch nightly fact-checking shows. Unlike the cable channels’ other programming, the shows will truly be non-partisan, with actual journalists instead of pundits. The shows will even call out exaggerations and falsehoods by their own hosts and commentators. The fact-checking programs will earn double the ratings of the partisan shows.
The infusion of money from Taylor Swift and Twitter will pay for a historic surge of fact-checking just in time for the November election. The money will create something of a space race at the local level, as TV stations, public radio, newspapers, and nonprofit news organizations mobilize to check politicians at all levels. Media companies will put aside their rivalries and share content.
Politicians will notice. In campaigns around the country, there will be fewer exaggerations and falsehoods. Politicians will try to out-do each other by bragging about their good records for Pinocchios and Truth-O-Meter ratings. Voters will go to the polls in November with an extraordinary understanding of what was true and what wasn’t. Some of them will be humming “Get the Facts.”
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the Knight Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.
Alana Levinson Brand-backed media gets another look
Tamar Charney From broadcast to bespoke
Nathalie Malinarich Betting on loyalty
Felix Salmon Spotify launches a news channel
Richard Tofel A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges
Don Day Respect the non-paying audience
Kathleen Searles Pay more attention to attention
Pablo Boczkowski The day after November 4
Hossein Derakhshan AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris
Tom Glaisyer Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful
Cindy Royal Prepare media students for skills, not job titles
Jake Shapiro Podcasting gets listener relationship management
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Power to the people (on your audience team)
Geneva Overholser Death to bothsidesism
Sonali Prasad Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional
Nico Gendron Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z
Steve Henn The dawning audio web
Brenda P. Salinas Treating MP3 files like text
Helen Havlak Platforms shine a light on original reporting
Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage
John Keefe Journalism gets hacked
Emily Withrow The year we kill the news article
A.J. Bauer A fork in the road for conservative media
Errin Haines Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story
Irving Washington Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job
Jakob Moll A slow-moving tech backlash among young people
Kevin D. Grant The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth
Mira Lowe The year of student-powered journalism
Simon Galperin Journalism becomes more democratic
Annie Rudd The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph
Carl Bialik Journalists will try running the whole shop
Doris Truong The year of radical salary transparency
Meredith Artley Stronger solidarity among news organizations
Raney Aronson-Rath News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions
Lauren Duca The rise of the journalistic influencer
Kristen Muller The year we operationalize community engagement
Beena Raghavendran The year of the local engagement reporter
Peter Bale Lies get further normalized
Whitney Phillips A time to question core beliefs
Candis Callison Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change
John Garrett It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization
Brian Moritz The end of “stick to sports”
Laura E. Davis Know the context your journalism is operating within
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks
Josh Schwartz Publishers move beyond the metered paywall
Victor Pickard We reclaim a public good
Jonas Kaiser Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Mariana Moura Santos The future of journalism is collaborative
Meg Marco Everything happens somewhere
Stefanie Murray Charitable giving goes collaborative
Michael W. Wagner Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative
Knight Foundation Five generations of journalists, learning from each other
Francesco Zaffarano TikTok without generational prejudice
Seth C. Lewis 20 questions for 2020
Jim Brady We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own
Sarah Alvarez I’m ready for post-news
Colleen Shalby Journalists become media literacy teachers
Christa Scharfenberg It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women
Zizi Papacharissi A president leads, the press follows, reality fades
Dan Shanoff Sports media enters the Bronny era
Logan Jaffe You don’t need fancy tools to listen
Monica Drake A renewed focus on misinformation
Kourtney Bitterly Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation
Lucas Graves A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters
Carrie Brown-Smith Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening
S. Mitra Kalita The race to 2021
Matt DeRienzo Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers
Joanne McNeil A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)
Greg Emerson News apps fall further behind
Gordon Crovitz Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms
Monique Judge The year to organize, unionize, and fight
Craig Newmark Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The business we want, not the business we had
Tonya Mosley The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends
Bill Adair A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song
M. Scott Havens First-party data becomes media’s most important currency
Sarah Stonbely More people start caring about news inequality
Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech
Rachel Schallom The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates
Barbara Gray Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement
Eric Nuzum Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show
Heidi Tworek The year of positive pushback
Jennifer Brandel A love letter from the year 2073
Bill Grueskin Our ethics codes get an overhaul
Rachel Davis Mersey The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide
Sue Robinson Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments
Dannagal G. Young Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
Matthew Pressman News consumers divide into haves and have-nots
Alice Antheaume Trade “politics” for “power”
Anthony Nadler Clash of Clans: Election Edition
Ståle Grut OSINT journalism goes mainstream
Tanya Cordrey Saying no to more good ideas
Elizabeth Dunbar Frank talk, and then action
Fiona Spruill The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves
Linda Solomon Wood Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal
Rick Berke Incoming fire from both left and right
Jasmine McNealy A call for context
Talia Stroud The work of reconnecting starts November 4
Joe Amditis Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table
Nushin Rashidian Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?
Margarita Noriega The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms
Cristina Kim Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”
Cory Haik We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it
Mario García Think small (screen)
Ben Werdmuller Use the tools of journalism to save it
Mike Caulfield Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd
Alexandra Borchardt Get out of the office and talk to people
J. Siguru Wahutu Western journalists, learn from your African peers
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline
Nicholas Jackson What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support
Jeff Kofman Speed through technology
Sarah Schmalbach Journalist, quantify thyself
Julia B. Chan We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young The promise of nonprofit journalism
Juleyka Lantigua A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions
Jeremy Olshan All journalism should be service journalism
Joshua P. Darr All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse
Kerri Hoffman Opening closed systems
Heather Bryant Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving
Catalina Albeanu Rebuilding journalism, together
Sara K. Baranowski A big year for little newspapers
Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor Think twice before turning to Twitter
Ernie Smith The death of the industry fad
Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz News coverage gets geo-fragmented
Imaeyen Ibanga Let’s take it slow