'Fact-checking' does a (hopefully fatal) face plant

The Democratic National Convention has exposed its structural flaws

Our nation’s political fact-checkers are making a mockery of themselves, going to absurd extremes to find fault with Democrats.

Part of the problem is that they are asking the wrong kind of question.

The right question is not: Is this one particular assertion exactly and provably accurate?

The right question is: Are these people lying to you, or are they telling you the truth?

That’s the key issue that all political journalists should be addressing – not just fact-checkers -- because a crucial distinction between the two parties is that the Republican Party is trying to sell the public a series of false narratives and fake solutions, while the Democratic Party is mostly sticking to the facts (with some minor exceptions).

But there's a structural problem with fact-checking as well. As I’ve been writing for years, the concept of fact-checking is a noble one, but the way it is actually practiced does more harm than good.

That’s because the fact-checkers are so devoted to not “taking sides” that instead of exposing the vast gulf in truth-telling between the two parties, they effectively hide it.

They want to mete out their dings if not equally, at least comparably. And that’s impossible to do, ethically, given that one party is constantly lying and the other is not.

This has all been particularly clear in the last few days, as the fact-checking machinery has revved up for the Democratic convention. Since most of what Democrats are saying is provably – or at least arguably – true, fact-checkers have descended to hairsplitting at best and laughably stupid assertions at worst.

One of the most widely mocked fact checks came from the Washington Post's Amy Gardner, who wrote:

“Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again,” Biden said. But that’s not true. Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.

The hairsplitting there is incredible. Trump, of course, still refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election. He has effectively threatened to do so again in 2024.

Linda Qiu of the New York Times called President Biden’s assertion that Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare “misleading”. It’s only misleading if you take Trump, an inveterate liar, at his word. At most it’s “debatable” or “arguable.”  But given that Trump previously proposed minor cuts in both programs, that he lacks a plan for how to keep paying for them, and that he is generally hostile toward the social safety net, it’s a pretty reasonable argument.

Another New York Times fact check by Qiu said Biden was “misleading” when he said that Trump “created the largest debt any president had in four years with his two trillion dollars tax cut for the wealthy.” Her baseless niggle? That “the debt rose more under President Barack Obama’s eight years than under Mr. Trump’s four years.”

But Biden explicitly said four years. So give me a break.

Washington Post lead fact-checker Glenn Kessler zinged Biden for this quote:

We know from his own chief of staff, four-star Gen. John Kelly, that Trump while in Europe would not go to the gravesites in France of the brave service members who gave their lives in this country, he called them "suckers and losers."

Kessler's beef was that Kelly "didn't directly say Trump refused to visit the graves because he thought the war dead were losers." But neither did Biden. (Although it's a reasonable inference.) What tripe.

One old Politifact fact-check that the organization retweeted on Monday actually got fact-checked itself by Twitter users. Poltifact had rated as “Mostly False” a video clip showing Trump saying  “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. And while it’s true that Trump quickly retracted his statement, he said it. The clip wasn’t unfairly edited. And there’s a strong argument to be made that he meant it.

An AP fact-check dinged two Democrats at the convention for “misrepresentation” for asserting that Trump told Americans to “inject bleach” into their bodies to fight Covid.  Yes, technically it’s true that Trump only asked about the possibility, rather than specifically advocating it. But I’d put that in the category of “reasonable hyperbole” instead. What Trump said was idiotic and dangerous, period.

And more to the point, these are all utterly trivial complaints compared to the litany of lies that Trump spews whenever he opens his mouth. Blatant lies -- about the “open” border, the “invasion” of immigrants, the “weakened” economy, “crippled” energy production, our “laughingstock” international standing, our “depleted military --  form the entire basis for the Republican platform.

Just as one example, CNN’s Daniel Dale told anchor Jake Tapper that Trump’s speech at the end of the Republican convention included “at least 22 false claims from Donald Trump on first listen.”

So how can you ethically do a "fact check" when one party is steeped in lies and the other is not?

Speaking of Daniel Dale, he alone among fact-checkers showed the way Tuesday night on CNN.

"There were few false or misleading claims on the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday,"  Dale reported.

Bravo!

He topped his article instead with a discussion of the radical right-wing Project 2025 planning document -- and how although Trump claimed he knew nothing about it, “it’s clear that Trump has extensive connections to Project 2025.”

Under that you could find a fact check of “one false claim, one misleading claim and one claim that left out some important context.” The false claim was from Sen. Bernie Sanders, who claimed that unemployment was “soaring” when Biden and Harris took office when in fact it had soared but was on its way down by January 2021.

A History of Failure, and the Way Forward

The critique of fact-checking for bending over backwards to be fair to liars is nothing new.

In 2011, Politifact infamously named a true fact -- “Republicans voted to kill Medicare” as the “lie of the year.” As I wrote at the time, Politifact made a  series of poor decisions, largely based on how they wanted to be perceived, and had as a result lost track of its core mission. They were not alone.

In 2019, in one of the primers I wrote to launch this site, I advocated for fact-checking to die and be replaced by reality-testing and gaslighting-fighting. Check it out. My complaint, even back then, was that the pace of the lying had become overwhelming, and the consequences of lying had become effectively nil.

In 2021, in the context of spurious charges of voter fraud by Republicans, I wrote about the importance of calling out the “why behind the lie.” I argued that calling out a lie isn’t enough. It’s still a disservice to the public if you don’t explain its purpose — if you don’t explain the motive.

In 2022, I wrote that fact checking should be replaced by credibility meters. I begged for fact-checkers to say, definitively, whether Biden was right or wrong in describing the threats to democracy posed by MAGA Republicanism. (He was right.)

Most recently, I wrote that a mealy-mouthed so-called fact check is an insufficient response to Trump and congressional Republicans engaging in deceitful antisemitic incitement.

There is a clear path forward. It involves not ghettoizing fact-checking to sidebars, but making it part of every main story. It involves doing it live, rather than after the fact – especially where Trump is involved.

Here’s my four-point plan:

1. The main news story about a lie should rapidly confront and dispel the lie with facts. (See, for instance, the “truth sandwich.”) Journalists should treat a lie like a virus, for which they are the vaccine, not the spreader.

2. Reporters should do this enthusiastically and repeatedly and prominently, as long as the lie remains part of the discourse.

3. Then they should probe more deeply, to explore motive. What purpose does it serve? Whose purpose does it serve? Who is funding it?

4. There should be consequences — or else what’s the point of fact-based journalism?

It won’t be easy. It requires a serious reset, at a time when the leaders of our major newsrooms seem entirely uninterested in a course change. But one can always hope.