Fact-checking alone won’t be enough to save democracy
In the wake of Donald Trump’s political resurrection, acclaimed Canadian author and journalist Jeet Heer wonders if “one of the best parts of journalism” still works.
“My speech is a little bit of a provocation,” said Heer in the opening to his keynote address, kicking off a national conference seeking to reimagine political journalism hosted by Carleton University in mid-November.
“We’re used to the political spectrum that came out of the French Revolution of left and right,” said the national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters.
“But I think that in the current moment, the actual political spectrum has been reconfigured, and it is pro-system and anti-system,” added Heer.
The pro-system group, which supported Democrat Kamala Harris in the recent U.S. presidential election, trusts institutions such as government, civil society and journalism. This group feels OK, for the most part, with the status quo. They see no need to “make America great again” because, as Hillary Clinton succinctly summed up the ethos in a 2016 tweet, “America is already great.”
The anti-system folk, on the other hand, propelled Trump to the White House again for what’s likely to be alternative facts: part deux. This group sent Trump to Washington to blow up what he called the entire “corrupt” system. This brigade of system skeptics increasingly distrusts institutions such as government, the legal system, science, medicine, education — and the news media.
“Trump’s whole message all along was, ‘this system is corrupt. Everyone is corrupt, and I know because I’ve bought and sold politicians,’” said Heer, echoing the president-elect’s campaign rhetoric. “The very tools that we have of fact-checking and of discovering scandal, the anti-system politician has an immune system to that,” added Heer.
Anti-system supporters disregard evidence
In this new bifurcated way of thinking about politics, anti-system politicians like Trump gained a superpower that inures them to the fact-checking work done by organizations such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Canadian Press’ Fact Checking and Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs.
Heer argues that these iconoclastic politicians can lie without consequence because journalists’ usual evidence-based scrutiny of them no longer matters to their anti-system supporters.
“Facts–schmacts” voters cheer political leaders who “give a finger to the established order,” including legacy elite media such as the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, said Heer.
Promising new research, however, suggests fact-checking does work for most people. While journalists’ longstanding and proliferating efforts to correct misbelief do not change long-held worldviews, research shows that fact-checking does have a “significantly positive overall influence” on factual understanding and can even “reduce belief in misinformation” amongst people exposed to this type of journalism.
Yet, in the new fractured pro/anti-system world, these polarized groups live in decidedly different news and social media ecosystems.
Polling conducted by Data for Progress before the U.S. election shows that Trump voters were less likely to pay attention to political news than Harris supporters.
Harris notably won voters who pay a great deal of attention to news by six percentage points.
The least engaged U.S. voters — those who say “none at all” or “a little” when asked how much attention they pay to politics — voted for Trump. Plus, these anti-system folks get their news mostly from social media such as YouTube and Facebook. They’re not reading the New York Times or tuning into cable news to read and watch traditional fact-checking.
And even if — and it is a big if — legacy media’s fact-checking pierces these Trump supporters’ filter bubbles, it probably won’t influence their opinions about the celebrity real estate mogul turned populist politician. A 2020 study concluded that when reporters fact-check Trump’s misstatements, it improves factual accuracy, even among Republicans and Trump supporters. Still, it does not change attitudes toward Trump, meaning these voters take “fact-checks literally but not seriously,” as some academics have argued.
Fact-checking backfired with anti-system voters
Heer contends fact-checking is failing because it has been “weaponized by pro-system people as a way of protecting the status quo and protecting it from legitimate critique.”
Indeed, Heer argued Glenn Kessler’s 2019 fact-checking of liberal firebrand Bernie Sanders backfired, fuelling mistrust in fact-checking.
Sen. Sanders, during a Democratic primary debate, said that the U.S. has “three people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America.”
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” column questioned Sanders’ statistically accurate statement.
“This snappy talking point is based on numbers that add up,” wrote Kessler, “but it’s also a question of comparing apples to oranges.”
“But people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth, as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have. So the comparison is not especially meaningful,” added Kessler.
“If this is your fact check,” wondered Heer, “then doesn’t this bring into question the whole task of fact-checking?”
Fact-checking’s superiority problem
Quoting Viviane Fairbank’s 2021 description of fact-checking in The Walrus as “a way to signal membership in the group of people interested in rational and moral superiority,” Heer worries about how journalism might further entrench anti-system sentiments.
“The problem is that if you set up a world where we have the facts, we’re the arbiter of facts, and you don’t have the facts, we tell you what the facts are … I think that’s alienating and it’s going to breed mistrust and has the exact opposite effect of what you would want.”
Media critic Dan Froomkin has also blasted fact-checking organizations that “go to extreme lengths to apportion their negative verdicts to both sides.” Froomkin criticizes this “hair-splitting” fact-checking for hiding the “vast gulf in truth-telling between” the Republicans and Democrats. For Froomkin, American journalists “want to mete out their dings if not equally, at least comparably. And that’s impossible to do, ethically, given that one party (Republicans) is constantly lying and the other (Democrats) is not.”
Bill Addair — the founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site PolitiFact and the author of the new book Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy — has similar concerns. Addair concluded that Republicans, indeed, stretch the truth 55 per cent of the time compared to 31 per cent of the time for Democrats. While this doesn’t mean that Democratic politicians don’t lie, Addair’s point is to highlight that fact-checkers wanting to be “balanced” about who they fact-check is actually misleading.
Listen more, check less
All this presents a “changing landscape” for journalists, warned Heer.
The longtime writer for publications such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review suggests reporters spend more time talking — and listening — to people with anti-system views and less time nit-picking what politicians, who spin the truth for a living, are saying all the time.
“We have to think about, not why people got the facts wrong or why they think these things, but where they’re coming from,” Heer implored his audience of journalists and journalism educators.
“I think a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing of people’s skepticism and doubt and even distrust of what we do comes from real places,” said Heer. “It comes from good places, and we have to meet them at those good places, and that’s how we can engage them so that they don’t end up at the bad places.”
Brooks DeCillia spent more than twenty years reporting and producing news with CBC. These days, he teaches journalism and studies public opinion and fact-checking at Mount Royal University.