Political Fact Checking That Doesn’t Amplify the Lie
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The next generation of political fact checking will offer humor and quicker turnarounds without further propagating the underlying deception.
Political fact-checking operations have proliferated over the last several campaigns. The Annenberg Public Policy Center launched the original FactCheck.org. The St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact won a Pulitzer for famously calling out politicians’ pants when they were on fire. And The Washington Post just launched a new and permanent Fact Checker column. Collectively, they have debunked death panels, vicious lies about light bulbs and birtherism.
But there’s a problem with the whole concept.
“The danger of print fact checking is that we have to describe what it is that’s deceptive before we correct it,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (and chair of Miller-McCune’s editorial advisory committee). “In the process, you’re laying down a memory track of the deception.”
THE IDEA LOBBY
Miller-McCune’s Washington correspondent Emily Badger follows the ideas informing, explaining and influencing government, from the local think tank circuit to academic research that shapes D.C. policy from afar.
Fact checking, in other words, can reinforce the whopper that needed checking in the first place. And cable news shows— in their subsequent coverage of the checked fact — can be among the worst enablers.
“When you think you’re commenting on how dumb an ad is,” Jamieson said, “you’re actually letting its message get through.”
The next generation of campaign season fact checking could ramp up the whole idea while mitigating some of these unintended consequences. Annenberg is now working on a third cousin to FactCheck.org — the aptly named FlackCheck.org — and it could be a next step to even more sophisticated, real-time, multimedia policing of political fibs.