Fact-Checking a World of Lies

The pressure is on for the media to find ways to ensure the truth is heard

I am pleased to share another guest essay from Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune metro editor, author—and astute observer of the media. He asks some necessary questions about how to respond to the rampant, shameless lying. He also provides some intriguing answers to help us consider whether media efforts can make any difference, especially against those clinging tight to false narratives.

— Steven

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Notorious liar George Santos was elected to Congress after major media failed to vet his largely fabricated resume. (April 2023 photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images)

You have to feel sorry for fact-checkers these days. The right-wing lie factory is operating 24/7, and the poor fact-checkers have to sleep some time. They’re getting overwhelmed, and there’s no sign that the lie factory is shutting down anytime soon.

In four years as president, Donald Trump produced a documented 30,573 false or misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. And neither he nor his fellow Republicans have slowed down since he left office.

Just last week came an example of how overmatched the news media are. CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who accused liberal states of allowing “post-birth abortion.” Instead of challenging that outrageous lie immediately, Tapper waited until the interview was over and followed up with DeSantis’ staff. He failed to confront the governor on the air and force him to defend his claim.

Too often, journalists are bringing a microphone to a knife fight. They’re not changing tactics enough to parry the Republicans’ “firehose of falsehood.” The RAND Corporation coined that term to describe Russian propaganda, but it aptly describes disinformation by America’s right wing.

We got a warning in 2012 that this was going to happen. That’s when Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke wrote a proper obituary for facts:

“To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.”

Huppke, now a columnist for USA Today, could hardly have envisioned how many more deaths facts would suffer in the next 11 years. Nor could he have imagined that the rise of Trump would mean that the death of facts would not only increase American ignorance but would threaten our democracy itself.

But we can’t give up. We have to keep faith that facts still matter to a majority of Americans. If they don’t, our system of government is doomed. Mainstream news organizations—Fox News excepted—still seem to think the public values the truth, and they do a lot of fact-checking to back up that belief.

CNN’s Daniel Dale, one of the best fact-checkers, notes the absurdity of having to take Trump’s crazy comments seriously: “I had to email the Boy Scouts to find out if the President had invented a nonexistent phone call from the head of the organization. (He had.)”

Other truth detectors include the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” which rates untruths on the scale of one to four “Pinocchios,” and the Poynter Institute’s PolitFact, which has a “Truth-o-Meter” that rates assertions as “true,” “mostly true,” “half true,” “mostly false,” “false” and “pants on fire.”

Among the claims earning the honor of “pants on fire”:

• A claim by George Santos, who was elected to Congress before fact-checkers caught up to him, that “I never claimed to be Jewish.”

• A bizarre Instagram post about supposed photographic proof that Mike Pence and King Charles II have clones.  

• A Facebook post insisting that there is no war in Ukraine.

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s dangerous contention that “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

• Donald Trump’s Big Lie that inspired the deadly attack on the Capitol and that he’s still repeating—that Joe Biden was elected with “fake ballots.”

It’s reasonable to wonder whether media truth squads are making any significant difference. Sure, their work comes in handy when you have to correct Uncle Milt at the family reunion, but are fact-checks having any wider impact? Are they cleaning up an increasingly polluted national conversation?

It’s hard to say. They certainly don’t seem to be intimidating the professional liars.

A real danger is that the public has gotten too accustomed to—and accepting of—the lies. As the Republican Party becomes ever more radical, its political motto seems to be: “If you’re not lying, you’re not trying.”

Fact-checkers have a lot going against them, and so they look for ways to seize the initiative. Instead of just debunking lies, they’re sometimes “pre-bunking” them. That means anticipating disinformation and priming the public with the facts before they hear the lies. An important pre-bunking tactic is when news outlets explain that it always takes days if not weeks to count all the votes—an attempt to guard against the rhetoric of politicians like Trump who want to stop the vote counting early if they’re ahead.

But pre-bunking can only do so much. It’s equally important to debunk lies in real time. Live interviews with dishonest politicians are always a problem because politicians can roll out six or seven lies while the interviewer is still trying to process the first one. That’s why interviewers need to be well prepared and willing to interrupt. Because CNN’s Tapper was unwilling to stop DeSantis and confront him, DeSantis’ lie won the day.

One idea to make live interviews more truth-based is something I suggested after CNN’s Trump town hall in May. I call it the Truth Buzzer. The news organization would have a panel of experts monitoring the interview, and when a politician made a questionable comment, a panelist would hit the buzzer and the interview would stop while the panel sorted out the facts and announced its conclusion. Then the interview would resume.

This idea isn’t practical, I’ll admit. Politicians would never accept it—especially lying ones. Perhaps a more practical policy is to avoid live interviews and insert fact-checking into the prerecorded interview before broadcasting it.  

In any case, aggressive measures are necessary if journalists are going to hold their own against lying politicians. Right-wingers aren’t simply misstating things. They’re weaponizing lies, and it can’t be tolerated.

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