The activity formerly known as fact-checking

-- BombThrowers--Remember when fact-checking was something journalists did to themselves, instead of an extracurricular activity deployed to fire hose even more political bias into every nook and cranny of the news cycle? Ironically, journalistic fact-checking is now performed almost exclusively on people who aren’t journalists. This aligns perfectly with other exemptions journalists unblushingly apply to themselves, such as the New York Times’ official policy that it will not publish letters-to-the-editor that criticize or even dispute writers published in the New York Times. In recent years, fact-checking other people (as opposed to checking your own paper’s content) has grown into a separate media beat. It is now the stealthy, de facto, third-front editorial page in most daily newspapers (after (a) the actual editorial page and (b) the editorializing blighting the rest of the news articles).