I am one of four French postgraduate students in the LSE Media and Communications involved in CrossCheck, an exciting journalistic collaborative verification project that helps French voters for the Presidential Election to make sense of what and who to trust online.
This article by LSE MSc student Margaux Gatty.
This project, partnered with First Draft in the lead up to French elections, is supported by Google News Lab, Facebook, newsrooms (AFP, Buzzfeed, Le Monde, BBC, Channel 4 and many others) and technology partners such as CrowdTangle, NewsWhip etc. For us students, it is a chance to become new pioneers in collaborative journalism.
In February we were taken to a beautiful castle in Normandy (where ironically enough for journalists, there were no phone signal), where we were served so much food it became a challenge to stay focused for a crash course on how to verify news content in 100s of ways. The training was rich and taught us expertise across numerous media and technology platforms.
We have now become project editors for the next 2 months verifying and cross-checking the trending news that surfaces in our assigned newsrooms in order to ensure content circulated online in relation to the French presidential elections is accurately reported to the public. It is especially important to reach out to the 43 million registered voters that will cast their ballots.
We’ll be reporting back during the campaign on our bid to filter out fake French news.
This article by LSE MSc student Margaux Gatty. @gattymargaux
Many of the so called news channels involved in this study have very similar editorial policies.
Of greater interest would be a study into what drives editorial policy, how these policies skew and bias what is actually printed and whether major news outlets such as the BBC can be trusted.
In the current disinformation age, is objective journalism dead? Are journalists allowed to write what they please, or are they hampered by vested business interests.
Should there be regulation against unsubstantiated reports as recently demonstrated by Buzzfeed reporting or will this hamper freedom of the press. And how free is the press if what is presented is driven purely by profit or vested interests with deep pockets?
How unbiased will this study be given that the 4 students will probably be looking for internships at channel 4 news, the BBC or Le Monde.
Also is this study yet another PR stunt or will the students publish and demonstrate methodologies used to uncover fake news.