The when, why, how and so-what of journalistic verifications in the age of post-truth.

The capacity of the media to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge was never so dependent on verification as in the post-truth era. To explore the epistemic role of verifications, covering their frequencies, predictors and underlying motivations, procedures and contribution to reporters' knowledge, this study combines qualitative and quantitative reconstruction interviews, comparing verified and non-verified items. Findings show that verifications are driven primarily by reporters' risk and opportunity calculations. The frequency of verifications remains surprisingly stable, yet this steadiness might be misleading, as we found and typified different types of verifications: from the shallow efforts to reduce risk and enhance precision of technical details, to the ambitious but scarce attempts to convey conflict and conduct investigations. In epistemic terms, reporters are anti-reductionists, setting a low epistemic bar, that allows them reliance on sources by default, as long as there are no "defeaters" (=counterbeliefs or counterevidence) inviting verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]