The interviews of Jordi Wild: do not shoot the fact-checker

The figure of the fact-checker has been mythologized in recent times, due to the explosion of manipulations. But I regret to have to say that the fact-checkers are like Santa Claus. The fundamental job of any journalist is to verify that what they are about to say or write is true. We have given it a glitter of dignity and the exotic plume of the anglicism –mom, I'm not a journalist, I'm a fact-checker–, but the name does not make the thing. I was thinking about it seeing the recent controversy with the fact-checkers who have worked for Jordi Wild in his three electoral interviews. There is a moment when the youtuber tells Ada Colau that nine out of ten arrested for theft are of foreign origin. She denies it and he asks for help from the fact-checkers, who brandish a headline from El Mundo as proof. A cascade of criticism on social media, great indignation. But it is better not to jump to hasty conclusions.

The example is interesting, because this data is correct –another thing is its spurious and deceptive use if it is used to criminalize immigrants wholesale, or if the economic and systemic causes that explain it are ignored–. The fact-checkers were wrong to use the Vox-leaning newspaper as a source. But if they had read the news, they would have seen that the data came from a report by the Guàrdia Urbana and the Mossos d’Esquadra in response to a question from a Vox official. What was missing? The basic element of journalism, which is becoming increasingly scarce due to the beating of the drums that marks the algorithm: time. Verifying live is complicated, because nuance and verification are slower than a lie thrown on the fly and displaced by the next falsehood. Wild has done a good enough job and so have the fact-checkers. But let us not be fooled by PowerPoint marketing nomenclatures. Nor by figures of Anglo-Saxon journalism only possible in hyper-muscled newsrooms that can afford to have journalists who do not write, but only scrutinize –in the good sense– those of their colleagues. That is to say, time, time, time.