WASHINGTON—Tegna has shut down Verify, the station group’s national fact-checking operation, laying off around 18 journalists, producers, researchers and other staff, according to published reports.
Tegna set up Verify in 2015 at local stations and expanded it in 2021 to help combat disinformation.
A statement on its website indicated that those efforts would now be handled by fact-checking efforts at local stations. “Our purpose is to help local communities, and our thousands of journalists across 48 newsrooms are committed to delivering trustworthy, accurate information, including impactful Verify work to help our audiences be better-informed news consumers,” the website stated. “Please visit your local Tegna station, including its streaming and mobile apps, for the latest local news, weather and information."
Tegna did not respond to questions about the shutdown.
The shutdown comes at a time when fact-checking efforts have come under fire from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr. The FCC is also investigating complaints about bias at three local stations, including one complaint that involves how the ABC presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was fact-checked in real time.
In a Dec. 2 interview with NewsNation, Carr signaled he might have the regulator examine fact-checking efforts as part of a larger effort “to smash” the “censorship cartel.”
“Look, at the end of the day, trying to draw the lines between disinformation and misinformation is very fraught,“ Carr said during the interview. “At the end of the day, more often than not, people are slapping those labels on political speech they disagree with. I think what we should try to protect is core political speech, religious speech, scientific speech. I don't think we want, you know, the FCC or any entity to be sort of superintending a lot of these decisions. But we have a lot of these fact-checkers out there that are really just narrative checkers.”
Carr also said, “I sent a letter recently to a company [involved in fact-checking] called NewsGuard that, in my view, has been at the forefront of this censorship cartel.”
