[tanseydavid]

No one is pretending that it presents a philosophical conundrum -- it is exactly that.

The vast majority of people would appear to miss this conundrum entirely and thereby never consider the fallibility and corruptibility of fact-checkers and/or experts.

If you do not agree with this viewpoint fine, but to try to attribute deceit ("pretending" in your words) to anybody who thinks differently about it from you seems really odd and highly presumptuous to me.

[8note]

In these cases where there's an obvious customer of the fact checking service, it is really obvious who is fact checking the fact checkers.

The condundrum isn't who, it's whether they're doing a good job.