BOUNDARIES NOT DRAWN Mapping the institutional roots of the global fact-checking movement Lucas Graves The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializes in debunking political misinformation. A growing occupational movement, originating in the United States but increasingly international in scope, has sought to legitimize fact-checking as unbiased journalism, to establish common standards and practices, and to secure reliable funding for this emerging genre. As a genuinely transnational professional movement which includes practitioners from multiple journalistic cultures as well as other fields, fact-checking offers a new site to consider whether and how professional journalism is meaningfully becoming globalized. This paper models a novel approach to mapping a diverse organizational landscape in terms of institutional ties to the fields of journalism, academia, and politics. Drawing on fieldwork from two international gather- ings of fact-checkers, I array fact-checking outlets on a ternary graph and review their competing understandings of the mission, the target, and the practices of fact-checking. I highlight areas of convergence as well as divergence in this organizational milieu, focusing particular attention on boundaries not drawn—the willingness of professional journalists in this global movement to share jurisdictional authority with non-journalists. I conclude with suggestions for a comparative research agenda focused on this emergent area of practice. KEYWORDS boundary work; comparative journalism studies; ethnography; fact-checking; professionalism Introduction It is amazing how far and wide we have spread … Think about what is happening here. Politicians all around the world are being held accountable for what they say in ways they never were before, in countries where they never were before … So we have started a movement here, a powerful movement in accountability journalism that’s really impressive. So declared the organizer of the second annual “global summit” of fact-checkers, after screening a video that, over a U2 anthem, highlighted fact-checking efforts on every continent. “Falsehoods come in many languages … Now so does the truth,” the video announced in bold text. 1 The July 2015 meeting in London marked the latest high point in what has been called a “global boom” in fact-checking (Kessler 2014). As partici- pants learned in the opening session, the number of active fact-checking sites around the globe had jumped to 64 from 44 a year earlier. Remarkably, only a very small handful of those sites existed before 2010; over the next six months the figure would grow to nearly 100. 2 “It’s a grass-roots movement,” the organizer continued. “Fact-checking Journalism Studies, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1196602 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Downloaded by [Lucas Graves] at 09:13 13 July 2016