Fact-Checking as News Framing in the Age of AI: Challenges, Cues, Coverage, and Culture

In their everyday work, journalists are tasked with detecting and correcting misinformation. As technology advances, these efforts have become increasingly reliant on automation. Research on journalism’s “debunking turn” focuses on AI’s role in fact-checking routines; content analyses uncover frames about AI within news stories. Yet scholarship rarely treats journalistic fact-checking itself as a framing practice. Embracing this view, this article reviews the historical context in which framing has been conceptually entangled with misinformation (“challenges”). Using current news items as exemplar cases, we then articulate four principles by which fact-checking implicates news framing processes (“cues” and “coverage”). Finally, we outline ways to study fact-checking as news framing, focusing on efforts to enhance journalistic literacy (“culture”).