By: Ava Menkes
The work of fact-checkers is complicated but integral to the functioning of the democracy. A study done by Harvard Kennedy School examined Snopes, PolitiFact, Logically and the Australian Associated Press FactCheck from January 2016 to August 2022, finding an increase in fact-checking articles during major events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. presidential election.
With a contentious election on the horizon, fact-checkers have been busy verifying and contextualizing the statements of the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, as they campaign in swing states and vie for the Oval Office.
Lucas Graves, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, studies political fact-checking, annotative journalism, net neutrality and the open-source movement, and teaches courses on political behavior, mass communication and society and intermediate reporting. He spoke with us about political fact-checking fundamentals and issues ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity
What do you see as the purpose of political fact-checking?
The central mission is to help the public make sense of political rhetoric and of all the information that they see and to distinguish what’s true from what’s false. Now, you might think, ‘well, isn’t that what all journalists do?’ And it’s true that journalists — their core mission is to report true stories as accurately as they can. But what sets fact-checkers apart is that they take some claim that’s already out there in the world, or some rumor, some hoax, you know, some video, some image, they take something that’s already circulating and then they evaluate it for its truth, and then they write that up. So it’s like a little report card on the truth of something a politician says, or some article that’s circulating, and so it’s not just reporting things accurately, it’s actually adjudicating the truth of things that are already out there in the world.
How should a journalist determine when to fact-check a politician?
On the one hand, you want to show that you’re checking politicians of all stripes, right? A legitimate fact-checking site should not only be checking claims from Democrats or only checking claims from Republicans. In order to trust a fact-checker, you want to know that they are willing to identify untruths regardless of the source. But at the same time, in a particular political season, in a particular political race, there might be crazier stuff, or more ridiculous claims coming more frequently from one party than another, and that can be for all kinds of reasons. One reason is when one party has an incumbent running and the other party has a primary. Primaries are very competitive, and so you have lots of people saying things to get attention.
You should try to identify claims that are likely to have an impact, claims that are more important because of what they’re about. In the same way that journalists decide what is the most important news story to cover or to put on the front page in terms of its potential impact on the public or its relevance to the public, if you’re a fact-checker, you’re going to try to fact-check first the most important claims, the claims that tie into major issues of public concern, the claims that might cause harm in the world if they’re believed.
Many people criticized Jake Tapper and Dana Bash from CNN for not fact-checking Trump during the live debate between himself and President Joe Biden in June. Do you think the passive approach of letting candidates reveal themselves works, or do you think they should have intervened and fact-checked both of the candidates during that debate?
I absolutely think that they should intervene, and that’s not just a question of fact-checking, but also a question of trying to push the candidates to respond to the questions that are being asked. Candidates have lots of opportunities to offer their scripted rhetoric to the public. They have plenty of forums where they can do that. The point of a debate should be that they are voluntarily submitting to the questions asked by journalists, or by people from civil society who are at that moment representing things that might be of importance to the public, so that the public can better understand what a given candidate’s policies are.
But for that to work, number one, they have to be held accountable for, again, responding to the questions instead of just using any question as a chance to repeat whatever talking points they feel like repeating, and number two, responding as accurately as they can. However, ad hoc, off the cuff fact-checking in a political debate doesn’t necessarily work that well. You need to build it into the structure of the debate.
That said, I think the moderators did an admirable job during the last presidential debate [ABC News’ debate on September 10]. I’ve read complaints that Kamala Harris was given a free pass, and it’s true both candidates made misleading statements that weren’t corrected. But the two times Trump did draw live fact-checks were in a different league. I don’t see how any self-respecting journalist could let that vile claim about Haitian immigrants, or about abortions after birth, go unchallenged.
Is it possible to over fact-check a candidate, and can this affect voter perception and potentially alter electoral outcomes?
It’s absolutely possible for a candidate to be over fact-checked in the context of a debate or some other public performance, because there is some responsibility to let them present their arguments in a coherent way. So there’s a balance to be struck, right? I mean, if you’re interrupting them in every response or every other minute to correct something, then that’s also interfering with the public’s ability to understand what they’re saying.
The fact is that anytime we see a fact-check of our preferred candidate, unfortunately, one of our first impulses is to assume that the fact-check is biased. So the best thing that fact-checkers can do is show all of their work, show the evidence that they’ve used to arrive at a particular conclusion, and also their methods. They’re sort of the standard methods journalists use in checking a claim every time they need to publish corrections very promptly and very prominently, when they make mistakes and they need to explain how they choose things to check…so they should be as transparent as possible and allow themselves to be held accountable by the public.
I’m thinking back to 2016 and the Hillary Clinton emails. People complained that the larger news organizations — the New York Times and Washington Post — overemphasized that story. I also heard a lot of rhetoric about the Times and the Post publishing too much about Trump, to the point where the press promoted his platform. How should fact-checkers navigate the idea that journalists shouldn’t serve candidate’s ideologies?
I’m glad you brought up the example of the emails. That wasn’t about fact-checking, but that’s a really tricky question, right? I mean, my own opinion is that the Times and other publications in hindsight, did give that story too much play, and we can speculate as to why that was the case. One thing we know is that journalists are at pains to show that they’re objective, that they’re willing to report bad news about either candidate. That was a very juicy story, right? There were little leaks coming out every day from the documents that had been leaked to Wikipedia. So that was kind of a perfect storm. It was really fueling this feeding frenzy among journalists. I think in hindsight, a lot of reasonable reporters think that in the end, that was kind of a non-story. Not that it shouldn’t have been reported on, but should it have led the front page of The New York Times on so many successive days? Should it have been such a prominent theme of the final weeks of the campaign, when it potentially had an impact on the narrative in those final days? Perhaps not. Those aren’t easy judgments to make. It’s easier to say that in hindsight. I suspect that something that helped was that everyone was convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
I have a hard time imagining a fact-checking related story that could have as large of an impact on the election or I don’t think we’ve seen that yet. Donald Trump and his campaigns, in his public statements since the 2016 race, is less careful with his public statements than other politicians. He demonstrably utters more things that can be shown to be false than other politicians, and that has been covered extensively and aggressively. I think fact-checkers very much saw Donald Trump as a different kind of candidate, because of his unusual way of speaking, compared to career politicians. For instance, the Washington Post throughout Donald Trump’s first term tried to catalog every single false utterance that he made. They’d never done that for any other candidate. They then did it subsequently for Biden for a little while. But fact-checkers did everything they could to draw attention to the truly extraordinary nature of the Trump campaign’s relationship to truth. And it’s not that that didn’t make a difference, but I think it made less of a difference than many observers expected or hoped.
Since 2016, Trump has called mainstream media outlets fake, telling his supporters not to trust coverage on him or his campaign. Do you think political fact-checking can deepen the distrust between Americans and their news outlets? How should publications navigate fact-checking in a way that’s sustainable and helpful while not potentially abusing it or over polarizing the public?
That’s an excellent question. That’s literally the most important question that fact-checkers are dealing with now, and there’s not really any good answer to it. We don’t have all the evidence that we need, but it is simultaneously true, as your question suggests, that fact-checking can actually widen the trust gap, because it makes journalists and news organizations appear more partisan. It makes them easier for politicians to attack. It increases antagonism between journalists and political figures simply because of the nature of the work.
If you’re doing high quality fact-checking, if you publish your methods, and you’re transparent about all your sources, and you publish corrections when you make mistakes…at least some people who read fact-checking appreciate that this demonstrates the journalist’s responsibility to report the truth to their audience.
Fact-checkers really struggle with this question, and they have engaged in all kinds of different sort of experiments in trust building to try to help people to understand that even though they identify some claims as false, or identify some candidate as producing a lot of falsehoods, it doesn’t mean that they’re against that person or that they’re taking a side in wider political debates.
There’s not an easy answer and you know, regardless of your ideology, it’s true that you, your first instinct will be to reject some fact-check that goes against the candidate who lines up with your beliefs, with your ideology.
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