It’s been about three weeks since ABC’s “This Week” host, Jake Tapper, took up NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on his challenge to fact check statements made by Sunday morning news show guests.
NBC’s “Meet the Press” host David Gregory passed on the idea, later saying, “”People can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms.”
Tapper has teamed up with the folks at Pulitzer-prize winning site, Politifact, which regularly fact-checks statements made by political figures using a handy scale that rates statements ranging from “Pants on Fire” to “True.”
Cross-posted (in a somewhat anemic format) on ABC’s web site, Politifact now dedicates a special section of its site to statements made on “This Week,” published online every Wednesday. It’s up to you to look them up and though Tapper gives the Politifact effort a plug at the end of the show, he doesn’t highlight the previous week’s fact checking results on the air. Despite that downside, it is a systematized effort to call BS on the various lies and misinformation bandied about by partisans on the Sunday shows—an attempt to check the sort of assertions that can’t always be countered on the spot during the show itself, which as Tapper says, is “obviously” what he aspires to do.
Politifact has had a go at it for two weeks now, with its third round of fact checked statements set to go live on Wednesday. Some are lukewarm, and you could argue that so far, it’s just half the loaf—it comes three days later, online and only scrutinizes a handful of statements made on the show. And frankly, none of the statements that have been checked have been earth-shattering whoppers.
Does that only prove it’s working – public figures are checking themselves before they wreck themselves? Or is this a gimmick? Does ABC’s commitment to fact checking its guests go far enough? How would you fact check the politicians and pundits on the Sunday morning news shows? Does the record need to be corrected on the air, where it was sullied in the first place—or is it enough for them be called to accountability online? Is it worth the effort at all, or is being a public figure watched by millions with the power to take to the Internet themselves, enough incentive to tell the truth?
I give it a big thumbs up. First, it appears that the biggest liars probably won't go on Tapper's show. That's a big plus for the audience. I'll bet we won't see congenital liars John McCain and Rudy Guiliani on ABC's This Week anytime soon. And that's a big plus for the show.
Second, guests who *do* go on the show are more apt to be truthful when they know ahead of time they are being fact-checked. And that's the goal, isn't it? To hold the guests accountable for the claims they make? I guess it would be more, um, exciting if someone got caught in big, egregious, pants-on-fire lies, good for gossip and all. But after all, the goal of the Sunday news shows is giving your audience information and perspective on policy and politics, not cage fights and LIAR LIAR gotchas. To the extent the fact-checking results in more accurate, more truthful discussions, that's a big plus for the audience.
And that's who's important here, right? The audience? Even though the Gang of 500 thinks the Sunday shows are for their own personal amusement as fodder for cocktail chatter, that's not really true.
But yes. The fact-checking needs to get back to the original audience. People who are informed enough to go to Politfact probably already know that John McCain and Rudy Guiliani are lying. The audience at home doesn't. And the lying politicians count on that.
Kudos to Tapper for his leadership in holding these people accountable for what they say publicly.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 09:10 PM
The corrections and clarifications should absolutely appear in the same space where the error was made. It doesn't need to lead the show but why not produce a "scorecard" statement as part of the weekly show?
Hey, if EPSN's Pardon the Interruption can do it as part of the broadcast, why not?
#2 Posted by jon, CJR on Wed 21 Apr 2010 at 09:34 AM
While Jon's statement about Pardon The Interruption was probably a joke, its a sad state when sports shows and comedy shows do more fact checking than news shows. This is because both sports shows and comedy shows are actually dependent on the truth. For sports shows, our public actually cares about the result and veracity of sports reporting. No sports organization could get away with lying about statistics or game wins and losses because people would riot in America. For comedy shows, the truth happens to be more hilarious.
Some might say that this is systemic of the public, but I believe its more systemic of our failing corporate news system than anything else. Our corporate news system does not want to fact check its guest because that may reduce the amount of high profile authoritative Washington insiders will come to the show. This will in turn lead to resorting to (gasp!) more investigative reporting, which would begin eating up at profits for news companies.
This is the state of things, sadly. While we must applaud ABC for this fact-checking stunt, we must also be aware that as long as companies slack on their duties to the public, our news system will be a poor apparatus for informing the public information they need.
There are millions of ways to achieve this, so I'll leave them unsaid.
#3 Posted by DVB, CJR on Thu 22 Apr 2010 at 10:18 AM
Tyndall Report argues that factchecking is all well and good but that four other checks are just as important as the check for Truthfulness:
Relevance
Comprehensiveness
Responsiveness
Balance
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5021/
#4 Posted by Andrew Tyndall, CJR on Fri 23 Apr 2010 at 08:52 AM