Communication and work in the Brazilian fact-checking landscape: a mapping of projects and professionals working in the sector

• Grant number: 19/01330-0
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): July 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Theory of Communication
• Principal researcher: Roseli Aparecida Figaro Paulino
• Grantee: Thales Vilela Lelo
• Home Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project fits into the current context of an intense concern about the impact of the propagation of misinformation in the public sphere (NYHAN & REIFLER, 2010, 2013) and the increasing credit attributed to the fact-checking agencies as a strategy for coping with fake news (NYHAN & REIFLER, 2012, GRAVES, 2016a, 2016b), in order to show that, despite the expansion of these initiatives in Brazil and the consolidation of an international literature on this subject, there is a paucity of studies in Brazil dedicated to: a) make a survey of the Brazilian fact-checking projects, identifying their regional distribution, the organizational structures that make these projects viable, their linkage or independence of the large media corporations, the financing models adopted, the sustainability of the initiatives and the socio professional profile of the communicators who work in the sector; b) an outline of the trajectories of journalists who enters in the fact-checking, how they call elements of journalistic culture and editorial criteria employed by agencies to give meaning of their work process, as well as the specificities of the interlocution with their readership. This research proposes to compensate these two deficits by means of a case study (YIN, 1994), with an exploratory scope (GIL, 1994) on this vein of the journalist's work world, using a triangulation of methods (FÍGARO, 2014), to compose a non-probabilistic sample that enables the elaboration of consistent mapping of the fact-checking agencies and a qualitative profile of the professionals working in the field.