Deciding What's True

The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism

Lucas Graves

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542227
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post 's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. As these journalists are the first to admit, in a hyperpartisan world, facts can easily slip into fiction, and decisions about which claims to investigate and how to judge them are frequently denounced as unfair play.

Deciding What's True draws on Lucas Graves's unique access to the members of the newsrooms leading this movement. Graves vividly recounts the routines of journalists at three of these hyperconnected, technologically innovative organizations and what informs their approach to a story. Graves also plots a compelling, personality-driven history of the fact-checking movement and its recent evolution from the blogosphere, reflecting on its revolutionary remaking of journalistic ethics and practice. His book demonstrates the ways these rising organizations depend on professional networks and media partnerships yet have also made inroads with the academic and philanthropic worlds. These networks have become a vital source of influence as fact-checking spreads around the world.

PART I

THE LANDSCAPE OF FACT-CHECKING

INTRODUCTION

A Brazen Lie?

THE 2012 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL RACE ENDED ACCORDING TO THE forecast, with a decisive victory for Barack Obama. But the closing days did bring one unusual development: the most emphatic collective debunking of a major campaign claim in the modern history of American journalism. The episode presaged what would be ubiquitous political fact-checking in the primaries four years later, when reporters’ instincts were sharpened by unusually wild rhetoric from several political outsiders—in particular a famous real estate mogul and reality TV star. In hindsight, it was all the more remarkable for centering on a comparatively mild campaign claim from the consummate establishment candidate.

At the tail end of October, with Election Day less than two weeks away, the campaign of Republican contender Mitt Romney began airing a tough new ad in the crucial swing state of Ohio. Polls showed President Obama performing unusually well among white working-class voters there, bolstered by the evident success of the government’s 2009 bailout of U.S. automakers. In his own commercials, Obama mercilessly exploited his opponent’s very public opposition to the bailout, which had included a New York Times op-ed with the unfortunate title “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”¹ Romney’s new attack ad, called “Who Will Do More?,” seized on a news bulletin out of Detroit to cast the government’s role in a different light. Over images of old sedans being flattened by an industrial press, a male voice offered a harsh appraisal of the White House’s record: “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to the Italians, who are going to build Jeeps in China.” As evidence for the last point, the ad flashed an out-of-context excerpt from a recent financial news item reporting that Chrysler “plans to return Jeep output to China.”

The attack finessed a charge Romney had made more bluntly two days earlier at a campaign rally in Defiance, Ohio, just an hour’s drive from a major Jeep plant. “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America,” Romney declared to enthusiastic applause. The candidate didn’t name his source, but earlier that day a blog at the Washington Examiner had reported, and the Drudge Report had repeated, that Jeep “is considering giving up on the United States and shifting production to China.”² Those reports pointed back to the same Bloomberg Business article which, despite some awkward wording, stated clearly that Chrysler’s reentry into Chinese manufacturing would not mean “shifting output” from the United States.³ Even before Romney took the stage in Defiance, a Chrysler vice president had posted an online response to what he called “biased” reports: “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.” The Obama campaign quoted Chrysler prominently in its own response to Romney’s charge, e-mailed to reporters after the rally in Defiance. Armed with that direct refutation, papers in Ohio and Michigan characterized Romney’s error in stark language. An article in the Detroit Free Press opened this way after referring to Romney’s “false claim” in the headline: “Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney repeated a false claim Thursday night that Chrysler Group may move all Jeep vehicle production to China, drawing criticism from the Obama campaign, which said the Michigan native had blatantly skewed a news wire story.”⁴

With this narrative already in place and media attention trained on Ohio, the reaction to Romney’s new commercial was swift and decisive. “Who Will Do More?” began airing in Toledo on a Saturday. The debunking started the next day at the Free Press and the National Journal, whose headline announced matter-of-factly, “Romney Ad Wrongly Implies Chrysler Is Sending Jobs to China.”⁵ By Tuesday a handful of national outlets as well as the Toledo Blade, the Des Moines Register, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Columbus Dispatch had issued fact checks; a blogger at the Washington Post marveled at the “brutal headlines” brought on by “Romney’s Jeep-to-China lie.”⁶ By the end of the week, the controversy had been covered across national newspapers and TV networks. “How out there is Mitt Romney?” Jon Stewart asked Daily Show viewers. “A car company—the people who convince you you need ‘undercoating’—are coming after him for his dishonestly.” Meanwhile President Obama turned the controversy into a laugh line in a stump speech:

You’ve got folks who work at the Jeep plant who have been calling their employers worried, asking is it true, are our jobs being shipped to China? And the reason they’re making these calls is because Governor Romney has been running an ad that says so—except it’s not true. Everybody knows it’s not true. The car companies themselves have told Governor Romney to knock it off.⁷

Journalists emphasized that Romney had aired the attack despite the controversy over his earlier remark. The New York Times addressed the deception in an editorial, a column, and at least five separate news reports as the attack drew new condemnations from Washington and Detroit.⁸ A front-page campaign analysis in the Times called the TV ad “misleading” in the first sentence, in the reporter’s voice.⁹ A segment on National Public Radio (NPR) played competing clips from the Romney ad and from Obama’s counterattack claiming Jeep was adding jobs in Ohio. The host, Robert Siegel, put the question to an NPR correspondent on the campaign trail: “Well, which is it, Don: they’re adding jobs in Ohio or sending them to China?” The reporter left no doubt that the facts were on the president’s side. Romney’s attack, he explained, reflected the need to “shake things up and really hurt President Obama” in a state that might well decide the election.¹⁰

The most thorough debunking came from three elite national outlets that specialize in fact-checking political statements: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Journalists at these sites had investigated thousands of statements like this one and, as is almost always the case, they reached similar conclusions. All three reconstructed in detail the circumstances of Romney’s claim and the wider history of Chrysler’s bankruptcy and bailout.¹¹ All three found the ad deeply misleading although it avoided the outright falsehood of Romney’s original speech. And all three fact-checkers went on to include the episode in their end-of-year reviews of the worst “whoppers” of 2012. PolitiFact named the claim its “Lie of the Year,” stressing that even though Jeep issued “a quick and clear denial,” Romney made it into a TV commercial that was “brazenly false.” The analysis continued:

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.¹²

Of course, it is impossible to say precisely what effect the controversy had on the Ohio results. Media and campaign professionals called Romney’s attack a strategic blunder for inviting a torrent of negative coverage. “It was a very high-risk strategy, and it backfired,” the Obama strategist David Axelrod declared.¹³ More interesting than the immediate political impact, though, is what the episode said about prevailing attitudes in political journalism. The immediate and nearly unanimous reaction in the press showed clearly how much has changed in the profession over the last quarter-century, and especially the last decade. It showed how comfortable reporters have become challenging routine political claims—even in straight news reports and often in their own voice. In this way it reflected the growing influence of professional fact-checkers and of the wider fact-checking movement in American news.

This book is about that movement. It tells the story of a group of journalists inventing a new style of political news, one that seeks to revitalize the “truth-seeking” tradition in journalism by holding public figures to account for the things they say. Whether the fact-checkers make any real difference in public discourse is often debated. But their success in building a new journalistic institution can’t be denied. Practically every national news organization in the United States offers some kind of political fact-checking today. Dozens of outlets across the country specialize in the new genre either as independent websites or as permanent features of a newspaper or news broadcast. All but a handful were established since 2010; scores more have taken root overseas.¹⁴

Newsrooms have long employed fact-checkers, of course, who verify the information in an article before it goes to print. References to proofreaders first appeared in U.S. periodicals early in the nineteenth century, with copy editors following a century later.¹⁵ Full-fledged fact-checking departments emerged at national magazines in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁶ The women’s section of the classifieds in midcentury newspapers advertised for fact-checkers alongside typists, secretaries, file clerks, and “his girl Fridays.” One can find examples from as early as the 1940s of a curious kind of inside-journalism story: rueful letters of praise from journalists to the obsessive, nitpicking fact-checkers who disturb their evenings and weekends and keep them honest.¹⁷ Today these paeans usually come tinged with concern that too many newsrooms no longer practice robust fact-checking.¹⁸ “Being fact-checked is not very fun,” the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates chided in 2012 after an embarrassing episode prompted Newsweek—which had shuttered its fact-checking department in the 1990s—to explain that its writers checked their own work. “Good fact-checkers have a preternatural inclination toward pedantry, and sometimes will address you in a prosecutorial tone. That is their job and the adversarial tone is even more important than the actual facts they correct.”¹⁹

This highlights a key aspect of traditional, internal fact-checking: it takes aim at the reporter, not the people being reported on. When a news outlet insists on verifying a source’s claims instead of simply reporting them as claims, the choice upon discovering a mistake has usually been to fix it or to cut it.²⁰ In his own ode to fact-checkers, the New Yorker writer John McPhee tells the story of the heroic efforts by one of the magazine’s researchers to verify a single paragraph in a sixty-thousand-word article—a nuclear physicist’s startling anecdote about a Japanese incendiary balloon blown halfway across the world to land on the very reactor making the plutonium that would soon destroy Nagasaki.²¹ McPhee had resigned himself to “kill” the passage when, just hours before press time, the fact-checker tracked down another source. Reached at a shopping mall—with the help of the police—the new source confirmed the story and the paragraph lived. The routines of internal fact-checking respond to the imperative to eliminate untruth, not call attention to it.

The new fact-checkers do just the opposite. They investigate claims that are already in the news and publish the results as a new story. The fact-checking movement asks political reporters to do something that can be quite uncomfortable for them: to challenge public figures by publicizing their mistakes, exaggerations, and deceptions. It asks them to intervene in heated political debates and decide who has the facts on their side. “After being trained for years not to take sides, you will now have to choose which side is right,” instructs a training manual for journalists new to the genre.²² This kind of fact-checking has precursors in American news, most directly in the “adwatch” reports on campaign commercials that proliferated in the 1990s. Over the last decade, however, political fact-checking has become a staple of professional news reporting in the United States. Fact-checkers now operate year in and year out, not only during elections. They investigate questionable claims wherever they surface, from political memoirs and Facebook posts to speeches on the floor of Congress. And they see themselves as a distinct professional cohort—a self-described fact-checking movement within journalism. Increasingly, fact-checkers have their own rules, routines, and “best practices,” hammered out in their own conferences and mailing lists. They promote their style of journalism tirelessly and celebrate its achievements vocally. “Fact-checking is not a fad. Fact-checking is not a novelty. It is absolutely here to stay,” PolitiFact’s publisher declared triumphantly at the first “global summit” of fact-checkers, in 2014. “At PolitiFact, we are reminded of our reach and importance every day as we spread this mantra: Words matter. What a politician says matters. What the government says matters. And when they make a promise or a claim, fact-checking journalists will check it out.”²³

This book investigates fact-checking through the three U.S.-based organizations that have done the most to establish it as a practice and as a movement: FactCheck.org, launched in 2003, and PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, both founded in 2007. These outlets are now well-established voices in national political discourse, cited constantly in venues from NPR to the Daily Show. They have won numerous awards for their work; in 2009 PolitiFact received a Pulitzer Prize, U.S. journalism’s top honor, for its coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.²⁴ (FactCheck.org was also a nominee.) Since then newsrooms around the country, large and small, have embraced the genre. The major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—all regularly offer on-air fact checks, sometimes in partnership with the full-time outlets. NPR coproduced a fact-checking series with PolitiFact and delivers its own fact checks of campaign claims as well as major political events like the State of the Union address. The Associated Press and the New York Times , standard-bearers of print journalism, have invested heavily in the new genre and now offer fact checks well beyond campaign season.²⁵ USA Today covers the movement avidly, cites fact-checkers often, and in 2012 began posting videos and reprinting articles directly from FactCheck.org, whose reporters appear in the paper under their own bylines. Only one major national paper, the Wall Street Journal , has not embraced the trend.²⁶

The fact-checking movement also includes journalists working in local and regional news outlets around the country. These efforts come and go, and no reliable count exists. But serious fact-checking initiatives can be found in traditional newspapers, like the “Truth Needle” at the Seattle Times and the Reno Gazette-Journal’s “Fact Checker,” as well as in online-only outlets like the Voice of San Diego and the Michigan Truth Squad. In 2012 and 2014, local TV newsrooms in markets from Elmira, New York, and Madison, Wisc...