A Theoretical Perspective on the Issue of Standardization of Fact-Checking in Data Journalism

- Investigative data journalism relies on data as a source and a tool for uncovering a story. The principles of working with data, searching, verifying, analyzing and data-storytelling differ significantly from traditional journalistic practices, but at the same time are an organic part of the journalistic material and the established standards and ethics of journalism. Fact-checking in data journalism is often reduced to mathematical verification of the correctness of data processing, with little attention paid to many other factors affecting the correctness and ethics of the text: the origin of the data, the methodology and motivation for their collection, the correctness of interpretation, the contextualization of the analysis results, and the correctness of data presentation in visualizations. At the same time, fact-checking in the field of data journalism is also seen only as a technological process of reconciling calculations, and not as a unified and systematic verification of journalistic material at all its levels, from technical to ethical. In this article, the author tried to fill the gap between the academic field and the practices of data fact-checking developed in newsrooms: existing methods of fact-checking in different editions were investigated, and existing gaps in data fact-checking were described.