ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of some of the issues faced by boundary drawing journalists and the scholars who study them. In research on fact-checking, scholars have discussed not only the manner by which fact-checkers may or may not actually change citizen’s opinions but also the more interesting manner by which fact-checkers are themselves enrolled in political debates about the nature of truth. The link between professionalism, objectivity, and truth seeking would come to be accepted, not only by journalists themselves in the form of an occupational ideology but by media researchers and journalism scholars as a related series of problems susceptible to historical and sociological investigation. Objectivity serves as a normative endpoint, one enabled by modernization and the growing social differentiation among politics, business, and journalism; it is seen not as a tool, or a claim, but as a goal, a “best practice” made possible by historical progress.
