TRUTH SQUAD — The Biden administration stole $1 billion from FEMA. The flow of fentanyl into the United States has been cut by half. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ’60 Minutes’ interview may be a “major Campaign Finance Violation.” These are just three of the more prominent ways the two major presidential campaigns (Trump, Harris, Trump again) have bent the truth this year according to PolitiFact, the prominent nonpartisan fact checking website begun by journalist Bill Adair in 2007. The site rates the degree of mendacity on a sliding scale, somewhere between “pants on fire” and “true” — both Trump statements fall in the “pants on fire” category, while Harris’ is simply “false.” The mission of PolitiFact, which is now run by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists, is fairly simple — call out politicians when they lie via an easily digestible format. And as campaigns have a tendency to spin facts — or straight up lie — as the election approaches, fact checks also rev up in the home stretch. This year, according to Adair, the website is working overtime: there are so many falsehoods that it’s become impossible for any organization to call them all out. The industry of fact checking has experienced a boom since Adair began PolitiFact nearly two decades ago. During the first Trump administration in particular, an entire cottage industry within the media popped up to directly address the falsehoods coming from the White House; news organizations hired specific “disinformation reporters” and focused their reports on directly addressing lies. That, in turn, sparked outrage from conservatives, convinced that these fact checking operations are full of double standards and amounted to nothing more than directed liberal campaigns aimed at discrediting conservative politicians. The fact checking industry is also confronting another, related problem — as reporting on disinformation has become more popular, so has overt lying from politicians. What can fact checking actually do to stop politicians from lying so much to the public? Is that even the industry’s job? These aren’t just academic questions. They have a direct correlation to how people vote, and how campaigns choose to message — and they’re ultra important in the final weeks of an election cycle. Can a well timed fact check convince marginal voters? Does it really matter in an increasingly tribal and polarized political environment? To get a better understanding of the industry and its place in modern American politics, Nightly spoke with Adair, whose new book “Beyond the Big Lie” is out this week. This interview has been edited. What is the value of fact checking as a project? Even at a time when people are so polarized and when they’re often getting their political news from partisan sources, fact checking is still really important, because it establishes a baseline of facts that enable us to have honest discourse about policy. Fact checking provides the ground truth that we need so that we can have an adult conversation about politics. There’s more fact checking now, but there also seems to be more lying in our politics. Can you talk about how those two things have proliferated at the same time? So, the first big wave of fact checking came in the early 1990s and was in response to the campaign of 1988. Then the second wave was started by factcheck.org in 2003 and PolitiFact and the Washington Post fact checker in 2007. Suddenly, fact checking became a much more common term, you’d hear someone say ’I want a fact check on that.’ But the rise of partisan media in around 2010 created these echo chambers that tended to work against fact checking and neutralize the effect of fact checking. That put us where we are today, which is, we need to reimagine how we distribute fact checks, we need to get more conservative fact checking outlets and we need to think about fact checks more as data that can be used to combat misinformation. We also really need to have political fact checkers in every state who are focused on fact checking congressional delegations and state legislators and governors. That has a really positive effect, because it’s like a state trooper on the highway with a radar gun. If politicians know that they’re going to be held accountable for what they say, they’re much less likely to lie. Just extending the radar gun analogy for a second, it seems like a lot of politicians see what’s on the radar gun and just keep speeding. Take Donald Trump, for example — So, Trump has been and continues to be a complete outlier for fact checking. No one has more of a history of documented lies as Trump. And he just continues to make things up every day. So I don’t think we should look to Trump as someone whose behavior is going to change because of fact checking. So the issue is not, could we change Trump’s behavior? Because I don’t think fact checkers ever will. But I do think that there are many politicians in the United States of both parties who, if journalists are holding them accountable, it will make them less likely to lie? Yes. So then why are conservatives convinced that disinformation reporters and fact checking projects are so partisan? Because it fits with the narrative that the media is too liberal that conservatives have been pushing for decades, and so it’s easy to say, you shouldn’t trust the liberal fact checkers either. If you look at what’s being said across conservative media, fact checking is routinely criticized, smeared, made fun of. So, if you’re a conservative media consumer, you’re hearing this constant drum beat. What are the limits of fact checking? Well, I think fact checking is information for people to make decisions. It is a distinct form of journalism because a reporter does reporting as thoroughly as they can, getting all sides of a claim, and then renders a conclusion on whether it’s accurate or not. The limits of it are, ultimately, it’s journalism. Now, it can be used in helpful ways, like Facebook has shown with its third party fact checking program that you can use fact checks to provide information to Facebook users, saying ’hey, this claim is false.’ And Facebook can use that to denote how much that post gets circulated. To that point, some people suggest that fact checking can become a limit on free speech, or can be used by companies or governments to limit free speech. What’s your response to that? Well, I am sensitive to the idea that we don’t want to limit people’s free speech, so it’s a delicate issue, but I’m also sensitive to the fact that disinformation can be spread with lightning speed on some of these tech platforms, and it’s useful to try to reduce the spread of that disinformation. So I think we can find ways to use journalism that helps inform people and reduces the spread of disinformation without inhibiting people’s free speech. Has the opportunity cost of lying for politicians increased or decreased in the last 20 years or so? Is there a calculation about how lying could hurt you that’s different now? Yes, I think lying used to have greater consequences than it does today. When there was a common news media that everyone read and watched and listened to, lying had greater consequences. When political campaigns targeted more of a mass audience, lying had greater consequences. Now that things are so targeted, whether it’s partisan news media or micro-targeting of campaign messages, I think lying is easier than ever, and it has fewer consequences. So politicians say, ’You know what? I’m gonna lie, because it’s worth it,’ and they really believe that they’re gonna score more points than it will cost them. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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