Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also
increasingly fruitless.
By
Media columnist
August 29, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT
Daniel
Dale met President Trump’s convention speech with a tirade of truth Thursday
night — a tour de force of fact-checking that left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper
looking slightly stunned.
The
cable network’s resident fact-checker motored through at least 21 falsehoods and misstatements he
had found in Trump’s 70-minute speech, breathlessly debunking them at such a
pace that when he finished, Cooper, looking bemused, paused for a moment and
then deadpanned, “Oh, that’s it?”
So, so
much was simply wrong. Claims about the border wall, about drug prices, about
unemployment, about his response to the pandemic, about rival Joe Biden’s
supposed desire to defund the police (which Biden has said he opposes).
Dale is
a national treasure, imported last year from the Toronto Star, where he won
accolades for bravely tackling the Sisyphean task of fact-checking Trump. My
skilled colleagues of The Washington Post Fact-Checker team, who recently published
a whole book on the
president’s lies, have similarly done their best to hold back the
tide of Trumpian falsehoods.
Dozens
of organizations, from Snopes.com to FactCheck.org and many others, are kept
busy chasing political lies, so many of which come from the current White
House. But here’s the rub. More than a decade after the innovative
Florida-based fact-checking organization Politifact.org won a
Pulitzer Prize, fact-checking may make less of a difference
than ever.
More
and more, fact-checkers seem to be trying to bail out an ancient, rusty and
sinking freighter with the energetic use of measuring cups and thimbles.
“My
biggest takeaway of the last four years is probably realizing the extent to
which big chunks of America are living in a different universe of news/facts
with basically no shared reality,” was how Charlie Warzel, who writes about the
information wars for the New York Times put it last week.
I
happened to be sitting in the WAMU studio in late 2016 when Scottie Nell Hughes
— then a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid
commentator for CNN during the 2016 campaign — said something startling, live
on the Diane Rehm radio show: “There’s no such
thing, unfortunately, anymore, (as) facts.”
Rehm
had pressed her about Trump’s false assertion that he, not Hillary Clinton,
would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted
illegally. That was a claim he seemingly had heard on Infowars — the conspiracy-theory-crazed
site run by Alex Jones, who at one time claimed that the 2012 massacre of 20
children and six staff members at an Connecticut elementary school was a
government-sponsored hoax.
Hughes
gave not an inch of ground: Trump’s false claims, she insisted, “amongst a
certain crowd . . . a large part of the
population, are truth.”
Belief,
therefore, takes the place of fact.
The
situation has only become worse since then. And as scholars have observed,
calling out falsehoods forcefully may actually cause people to hold tighter to
their beliefs.
That’s
the “backfire effect” that
academics Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler wrote about in their study “When
Corrections Fail” about the persistence of political misperceptions: “Direct
factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual
beliefs.”
Not
knowing what media sources to believe — and the growing mistrust in the press
among many segments of the public — has added to the problem of politicians who
lie.
Last
week, I was asked to settle a family dispute about the believability of a news
report that had been circulating on a group text-message chain.
One
family member (I’m being vague since I hope to continue to be invited to
Thanksgiving dinner) was outraged by the supposed revelations in a Newsweek
article whose headline read “Brand New Mail Sorting Machine Thrown Out at USPS
Center, Leaving Workers Sorting by Hand.”
Another
family member had serious doubts about whether this was true. He dismissed it
as “hearsay.”
And a
third asked me to take a look: Would I have published the article?
It
didn’t take me long to decide it wasn’t credible or publication-worthy.
Newsweek, despite its legacy name, is suspect from the start these
days. The article’s sourcing was thin. And a hyperlink, its main piece of
evidence, led me to a local news site that already corrected the main element
of its story. (Days later, Newsweek still hadn’t updated its story.)
These
family members care about the facts, and were engaged enough to be curious
about whether a report is accurate. And while it may have suited their politics
better if it were true, they were open to hearing that it
wasn’t.
But
most people don’t have the time or energy to do research projects on the news
they are reading, or the claims they are hearing from the White House, or the
conspiracy theories that flood their Facebook feeds.
Most
people no longer share with their fellow citizens the trust in news organizations
— or in political actors — that would give them confidence in a shared basis of
reality. And worst of all, the flow of disinformation on social media is both
vile and unstoppable.
In this
world, challenging official lies and seeking truth remains necessary, even
essential. The yeoman’s work of Daniel Dale, and others like him, remains
appreciated.
But I’m
with Warzel on this: As Americans, we’re in trouble when it comes to a common
ground of reality on which to stand.
And no
amount of fact-checking is going to solve that overwhelming problem.
