The lies we tell ourselves about fact-checking the president

Real-time editorial judgment is not easy, and debates are special beasts in the world of political coverage. While it’s true that straining to be “objective” can often lead journalists astray, debates inherently equalize two or more candidates, so you have to observe certain equivalences. Biden may want that crawler, but that crawler also has to keep Biden honest to justify its existence.

Besides, Lockhart’s premise that Trump’s propensity for lying is an argument against debating him kind of misses the point about debates, which don’t exist to be awesome demonstrations of either fact-wrangling or truth-telling. The media often takes a back seat in disputes between presidential candidates. One of the lessons from 2004’s entanglement with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was that many political reporters didn’t much care that John Kerry had been slandered. Instead, they transferred the duty of keeping the Swift Boaters honest to Kerry himself, framing it as a test of his mettle.

That attitude has deepened in the years since. So if Trump unleashes a flood of lies during the first presidential debate, whether Biden can contend with the lies and beat them back will be considered an awesome test of his fitness. By this reasoning, Trump’s worst tendencies are valuable challenges that will tell us what kind of president Biden will be. This is why debate moderators tend to stay out of the fact-check firing line. As Commission on Presidential Debates co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf recently told reporters, “It’s not our job to be the fact-checker, it’s our job to put on the debate, with the candidates, to be fair, balanced, and not take sides, and let the American people make a decision.” Like it or not, this sets the stage for Trump to spend his debate nights lying and forcing Biden to parry those lies.

But the fact that Trump lies so often ought to tell us something. Lockhart is right when he says the media needs to prepare for it. The problem is that all of that preparation should have happened many years ago.

Since Trump arrived on the political scene, the media has largely been either indifferent or resistant to the idea that he needs to be covered in a different way. That he lies so easily and so flamboyantly is hardly a guarded secret; it’s been his known modus operandi from back in his Manhattan real estate days. The media environment in which Trump thrives struggles to call a lie by its name and has not built a culture of consequences for powerful liars. What’s more, there are intense debates among media critics about how to erect one, as the act of debunking a lie can often lead to the lie gaining more prominence.

Regardless of these debates, it’s September 2020. We’re long into the Trump presidency, we’ve repeatedly put the president on blast, aimed our cameras and our snide chyrons at his deceptions, repeatedly caught him with his pants down, and what has it accomplished? There are enough voters who want the liar to stay in power to keep the election close.
–Jason Linkins, deputy editor

We regret to inform you that Bill Barr is at it again, but Matt Ford is on hand to document the attorney general’s latest peregrinations into anti-Americanism. Matt’s also taken a look at the recent allegations involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement green-lighting forced hysterectomies on detainees, and he has decided that the time has come for lawmakers to deputize themselves with new powers to provide oversight over this wayward agency. In campaign news, Walter Shapiro commemorates the quadrennial tradition of Democratic Party bed-wetting over its electoral fortunes. Alex Shephard examines the hilarious genre of op-eds that feature writers who would never vote for Joe Biden in a million billion years making outlandish claims about how Biden is forcing them, ever so reluctantly, to vote for Trump. Alex Pareene suggests a common ground among warring liberal factions: Just create a Democratic Party dedicated to making the system work. Elsewhere, Tim Noah says that OSHA’s timidity during the pandemic has been nigh-on scandalous. Bruce Bartlett reminds everyone that corporate America didn’t get so steroidally hostile to the public interest until Milton Friedman gave it permission. Libby Watson invites us to consider whether the United States, as a matter of policy, isn’t just oriented toward killing lots of innocent people. Osita Nwanevu examines the way Trumpism isn’t really a political campaign anymore, but a civic religion. Also, we read the worst essay in the world on liberal disillusionment and the Electoral College, so that you don’t have to.