In serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published.

To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.

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kragen 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The people doing that job are not the ones being targeted here.

	▲	input_sh 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety. Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.

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nephihaha an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.

	▲	input_sh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Mainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many. In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another. Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly. Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.