A Comparative Study of Fact-checking News Coverage between South Korea and the United States

Abstract

This study investigated how the Korean and U.S. news media implemented impartiality and transparency in their fact-checking reporting, and identified the key patterns of similarities and differences in the coverage between the two countries. To this end, we content-analyzed 249 Korean and 230 U.S. fact-checking news articles during the latest presidential election in each country. On the whole, findings showed that in both countries, the political stances of the news media affected how they presented political parties in their fact-checking coverage, indicating that fact-checking journalism did not successfully implemented the principle of impartiality particularly in terms of balance. The number of sources was similar between the two countries, but the U.S. fact-checking reporting adopted more diverse viewpoints. The U.S. coverage was also more transparent than its Korean counterpart in identifying news sources.