I can't imagine that any sane adult wouldn't want facts
checked.
"Trump and Vance are angry about fact-checking at the
debates. Here's what voters think
Question: When did fact-checking become an outrageous
abuse of debate moderators' power?
Answer: When MAGA Republicans decided they didn’t like
anyone pointing out that they're lying.
In a perfect world, it might be enough for political
opponents to correct each other’s prevarications and
exaggerations. But Donald Trump’s entry into
presidential politics, with his incessant flights of
fancy and nonstop lying, have completely changed the
dynamics. While other presidential candidates have
stretched the truth, only one has kidnapped it, bound
and gagged it, put it in a barrel and tossed it into
the East River.
In the age of Trump, fact-checking has become a
necessary service for moderators and other journalists
to provide to voters.
Take the first and probably only presidential debate
between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, on
Sept. 10.
Some Trumpers went bonkers after ABC News' David Muir
corrected one of the former president’s most egregious
and dangerous falsehoods — that Haitian immigrants in
Springfield, Ohio, were abducting pets and eating them.
Muir noted that Springfield’s city manager said there
were no credible claims of pets being “harmed, injured
or abused by individuals within the immigrant
community.”
“But the people on television say their dog was eaten
by the people that went there,” Trump insisted in the
course of a rant that launched a kajillion memes.
There is not a single television interview of any
Springfield pet owner claiming their cat or dog was
stolen and eaten by immigrants. There was a news story
about a woman killing and appearing to eat a cat, but
she was born in and lived in Canton, about 175 miles
away from Springfield. (She was reportedly charged with
"disorderly conduct by reason of intoxication," among
other offenses.)
In any case, Muir didn’t just have a journalistic
obligation to call Trump on his race-baiting lie. He
had a moral obligation to do so because that kind of
incendiary claim can get people killed. Springfield has
yet to recover from Trump’s collective character
assassination.
In the first and only vice presidential debate last
week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance picked up where Trump left
off, blaming "illegal" immigrants in places such as
Springfield for overwhelming schools and hospitals and
driving up the price of real estate. Moderator Margaret
Brennan of CBS News correctly noted that the Haitian
immigrants Vance was alluding to are, in fact, here
legally. Most have what is called temporary protected
status, a designation that the Biden administration has
expanded.
“Margaret,” Vance complained, “the rules were that you
guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you're
fact-checking me, I think it's important to say what's
actually going on.”
He went on for a moment, but what’s actually going on
is far too complicated for a debate sound bite, and the
moderators soon cut both candidates’ microphones, which
was allowed by the rules.
Trump supporters blew their lids.
“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” posted the conservative
firebrand Megyn Kelly, who was axed by NBC News in 2018
for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with white
people wearing blackface for Halloween. Kelly, who
herself famously tangled with Trump as a debate
moderator for Fox News, also once insisted that Santa
Claus cannot possibly be Black because he “just is
white.”
The F-word, by the way, is apparently Kelly’s go-to
response in defense of Trump. After the world’s most
popular singer endorsed Harris, Kelly responded, “F
you, Taylor Swift.” Elegant! I can’t wait to hear what
she says about Bruce Springsteen's recent Harris
endorsement.
"'Fact check’ has become just another word for
censorship,” was the headline on a recent New York Post
column by Douglas Murray, a senior fellow at the
National Review Institute.
This makes no sense. Censorship implies suppression of
speech before it is aired. In a broadcast debate, a
candidate actually has to spout the lie before
moderators can correct it.
Murray condemned Muir and fellow moderator Linsey Davis
for failing to contradict Harris when she claimed that
Project 2025 is “a detailed and dangerous plan … that
the former president intends on implementing if he were
elected again.”
“They must have known that the big Democratic boogey
man ‘Project 2025’ has nothing to do with Donald Trump
or his campaign,” Murray wrote, presumably with a
straight face.
This is such bald-faced lie that I would be remiss if I
did not fact-check Murray myself.
Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump
administration by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
At least 140 former members of Trump’s first
administration are involved, CNN has reported,
including six former Cabinet secretaries. It calls for,
among other things, abolishing the Department of
Education and Head Start, ending efforts to combat
climate change, undermining the independence of the
Justice Department, effectively enacting a nationwide
abortion ban, and dismantling what MAGA Republicans
call “the deep state,” known to those in the reality-
based community as “government.”
A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings
Institution said that parts of Project 2025 “are more
closely aligned with a white Christian nationalist
worldview than a traditional, conservative education
policy agenda.”
Once Project 2025’s radical plan to overhaul the
executive branch became widely known and the public
reacted negatively, Trump pretended as if he’d never
heard of it. And the conservative, Trump-promoting New
York Post would very much like you to believe that
untruth.
As it happens, most Americans think debate moderators
should fact-check. According to a June survey by Boston
University’s College of Communication (my graduate
school alma mater), more than two of every three
Americans surveyed said “moderators should point out
factual inaccuracies” in candidates' statements during
debates.
The survey did find a partisan discrepancy: While 81%
of Democrats supported fact-checking in real time, 67%
of Republicans did.
Gee, why do you suppose that is?"
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