The Fact-Check Is Not Enough
The fact-checking movement has accomplished something genuinely valuable: it has created an infrastructure for verifying individual claims made in public discourse. This is important work, and I do not diminish it.
But I am here to argue that it is not enough, and that the belief that it is enough is itself a problem.
The limitation of fact-checking is structural. Fact-checking operates at the level of individual claims: this statistic is accurate or inaccurate, this quote is real or fabricated, this event did or did not occur as described. What fact-checking cannot address is the narrative – the larger story within which individual facts are arranged to produce a meaning that the facts themselves do not support.