The thesis reflects on the global health crisis caused by covid-19, which, as the first post-truth epidemic, has faced journalism with a novel test: the fight against misleading communication whose impact has been increasingly shown to have undermined the role of news and the dynamics of how beliefs are formed in contemporary societies. Due to the destabilized assumptions about news and truth, contemporary journalism has increasingly resorted to fact checking. Coupled with the professional discipline of verification of facts, fact checking has become a vital way of affirming the truth through journalism. The theoretical part of the thesis substantiates the terms that are synergizing in the post-truth era, the second part determines the practical level of normative journalism in the covid-19 era using the method of in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysis of internal documents. The aim of the thesis is to examine how the principles of verification and fact checking have been implemented in journalistic practice during the epidemic, a time characterized by a high level of confusion and uncertainty, some of which originates from conflicts between different sources and facts. The findings suggest that both procedures for the affirmation of truth are highly valued in journalism, but journalists also warn there are significant impediments in pursuing these imperatives of the journalistic profession, which cannot effectively address the new challenges of public (online) discourse alone. According to the findings, the scope of the infodemic exceeds the capacity to effectively verify and check facts, but the epidemic
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