Facts or Interpretation?

For fact-checking, it's helpful to draw distinction between two activities:

• News Gathering, where news organizations do investigative work, calling sources, researching public documents, checking and publishing facts, e.g. the getting the facts of Bernie Sanders involvement in the passage of several bills.
• News Analysis, which takes those facts and strings them into larger narrative, such as "Senator Sanders an effective legislator behind the scenes" or "Senator Sanders largely ineffective Senator behind the scenes."

The news gathering piece is affected by this, but in many ways largely separate, and the reputation for fact checking is largely separate as well. MSNBC, for example, has liberal slant to its news, but smart liberal would be more likely to trust fact in the Wall Street Journal than fact uttered on MSNBC because the Wall Street Journal has reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that MSNBC does not.

- from Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers by Mike Caulfield, https://mikecaulfield.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/webstrategiesforfact-c...