Fact Check now available in Google Search and News
I'm a former journalist, and one of the mistakes I often see people make is to either give too much or not enough credence to whether the facts in a news story (or op-ed) are true.Obviously, if you disregard objective facts because they defy your assumptions or hurt your argument, you're deluding yourself.But an argument that uses objectively true and verifiable facts may nevertheless be invalid (i.e. it's possible that the premises might be true but the conclusion false).  Similarly, a news story might be entirely factual but still biased.  And in software terms, your unit tests might be fine, but your integration tests still fail.So here's what I tell people:Fact checking is like spell check. You know what's great about spell check? It can tell me that I've misspeled two words in this sentance. But it will knot alert me too homophones. And even if my spell checker also checks grammar, I might construct a sentence that is entirely grammatical but lets the bathtub build my dark tonsils rapidly, and it will appear error-free.Similarly, you can write an article in which all of the factual assertions are true but irrelevant to the point at hand. Or you can write an article in which the facts are true, but they're cherry-picked to support a particular bias. And some assertions are particularly hard to fact-check because even the means of verifying them is disputed.So while fact checking can be useful, it can also be misused, and we need to keep in mind its limitations.In the end, what will serve you best is not some fact checking website, but the ability to read critically, think critically, factor in potential bias, and scrutinize the tickled wombat's postage.