Eliminating Uncertainty by fact-checking practices

Résumé En

The purpose of this paper is to examine how European media face uncertainty in the broader context of an information disorder that would affect democratic societies. We will study how, through a few examples of fact-checking practices, the media delimit and seek to reduce the uncertainty that characterizes information, its value and its use in the democratic debate. The European media environment would be characterised by its "information disorder" (Wardle, 2018) in which the information market is no longer controlled only by the media but also by other actors, which makes the dissemination of information more blurred and reduces the power of journalists and editors over the information produced (Westlund, 2019). Researchers thus evoke a weakness of true (Revault D'Allonnes, 2018) or a broader context of a "post-truth" era (Ferraris, 2019; Cervera-Marzal 2018) because reliable information, competing with misinformation and disinformation, would create a situation of uncertainty in which the information consumer would have become well unable to distinguish the true from the false. Uncertainty would thus affect several dimensions of the infocommunication process of journalistic information. As a result of these phenomena, the process of production of information is changing. Driven by new reception practices and encouraged by public authorities, media cannot simply produce meaningful content, they must also publicly demonstrate that they produce a quality information for rebuilding public trust in the media. The case of fact-checking devices is thus a symptom as well as a response to this media disorder caused by uncertainty. This type of device aims to address uncertainty on at least two levels. On the one hand, in practice, fact-checking discriminates between the true and the false by making transparent the processing of verification and information to obtain the support of the information consumer. Does fact-checking thus manage to drive the consumer to certainty, which would no longer be a simple belief based on trust but a firm conviction based on objective criteria? On the other hand, fact-checking is presented as an interactive mediation that is attentive to the questions of audiences. In this way, it seeks to attract new audiences, who are supposed to be more suspicious of the information offered by mainstream media. But is this enough to cure uncertainty in the information markets? These fact-checking mechanisms, which are supposed to identify, reduce or even eliminate uncertainty, present two major challenges: epistemological in relation to the underlying approach, protocols, techniques adopted, and roles assigned ; and political: these measures, encouraged by the public authorities, are considered essential for our democracies, as we saw during the last European elections.Finally, to what extent does the notion of uncertainty provide a better understanding of the challenges of the media and information crisis? It would be useful to deconstruct it to detect its implicit nature when it is applied to the phenomena of disinformation and media crisis.