Research Memo #5: Fact-Checking, Blackface and the Media
Taylor Owen, Peter Loewen, Derek Ruths, Aengus Bridgman, Robert Gorwa, Stephanie MacLellan, Eric Merkley, Andrew Potter, Beata Skazinetsky & Oleg Zhilin
October 2019
Executive Summary
If there is a general theme emerging from these Digital Democracy Project reports, it is that much of the received wisdom about the current state of the media and democracy is, if not false, at least poorly supported by the available evidence. For example, contrary to popular belief, Canadians do not live in media-driven partisan echo chambers, and their trust in mainstream media remains quite high. And while there is some evidence of political polarization, that appears to be driven largely by the parties themselves and not by the media.
The good news, then, is that there appears to be a great deal of room for the media to play a valuable and constructive role in sustaining good-faith democratic engagement. This week’s report builds on these themes in two ways.
First, we have new survey results that suggest that there is a great deal of support among Canadians for fact-checking, and that it can be effective. Yet while fact-checking is a practice that has long been considered part of the bread and butter of accountability journalism, there is little evidence that journalist-based fact checking is more effective than any other means.
Second, a data-driven analysis of Justin Trudeau’s blackface controversy shows that the initial flood of online activity was marked by widespread sharing of solid journalism. As the initial interest in the story waned, further activity consisted by and large of conservatives talking among themselves, with little evidence of the conversation being influenced by inauthentic actors.
KEY ISSUES: FACT-CHECKING
Canadians are in broad agreement that fact-checking is valuable in politics. This echoes a key finding from Research Memo 1, which found high levels of trust in traditional media to deliver objective and accurate information about the election.
Our finding from Research Memo 2, that fact-checking works in correcting misinformed voters, was further confirmed in this report. However, this report found that journalists are no more convincing than politicians or unaffiliated Twitter users when it comes to fact-checks.
Fact-checks may help people to feel more confident in their ability to understand and participate in politics, but this is more likely to be the case for those who already understand the issues. We also find no evidence that fact-checking politicians reduces trust in politicians as a source of political information.123
KEY ISSUES: TRUDEAU AND BLACKFACE
The general public’s discussion of the blackface story on social media dropped dramatically after three days. Tweets on the topic from journalists and election candidates had a similar decline.
Discussion on blackface-related hashtags is dominated by Conservative partisans; features links to generally informative pieces of journalism about the controversy; and lacks evidence of disproportionate inauthentic activity.
This is the fifth report from the Digital Democracy Project, a partnership between the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The project uses data from both public opinion polling and online media analysis to examine the media habits of the broader Canadian public as well as the political and journalistic class, with an eye to understanding the various relationships between media use, partisanship, political knowledge, and concern over policy issues.
