Several fact-checking operations say they have been preparing for weeks ahead of Tuesday’s showdown between the Republican and Vice President Kamala. Harristheir only debate currently scheduled before the November 5th Elections.
Democrat Harris will also face scrutiny for how she presents her and President Joe Biden’s White House record, as well as her own political agenda.
CNN faced criticism for failing to issue real-time corrections when Trump made a series of false claims during his June debate against Biden, whose poor performance ultimately led to his exit from the race.
According to the network’s internal fact-checker, Trump made more than 30 such statements, including the baseless claim that Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth.
Meanwhile, outlets including AFP and the New York Times devoted huge resources to fact-checking the debate, and plan to do so again next week. The Times focused 29 journalists on fact-checking the June showdown, several more than it assembled for Trump’s first debate in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. The American fact-checking website PolitiFact also assembled 27 journalists to cover the event, which editor-in-chief Katie Sanders described as her “largest team yet.”
“We see our highest traffic on debate night, so we’re going all-in on staff,” Sanders told AFP, adding: “For some voters, this is their only chance to get fact-checked.”
The nonprofit has been quick to filter Harris’s preferred attack lines since she joined the race in July, and is also examining which falsehoods Trump is most likely to repeat.
“What looks like a live fact-check during debate night is actually the result of days, weeks and months of constant fact-checking of the candidates,” Sanders said.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that Trump regularly invents new false or misleading claims, in addition to repeating old favorites, such as his baseless claim of significant fraud in the 2020 election.
“There has never been a presidential candidate like Trump who has deliberately used lying as a campaign strategy,” Alan Schroeder, professor emeritus at Northeastern University, told AFP.
The Washington Post recorded 30,573 false or misleading statements Trump made during his tenure in the White House.
‘An impossible position’
Schroeder, the author of a book on presidential debates, said misstatements on the debate stage often generated mountains of humiliating news coverage.
A gaffe over the Soviet Union’s presence in Eastern Europe became a decisive moment in Gerald Ford’s electoral defeat in 1976, for example.
But Trump’s repeated lies have changed the parameters of the game.
“In debates, this means throwing so many falsehoods into the dialogue that it becomes impossible to provide corrections or context in real time,” Schroeder said.
Trying to insert fact checks into the conversation without appearing biased puts moderators “in an impossible position,” he told AFP.
“Any amount of time spent refuting or clarifying erroneous claims during a debate is time not spent discussing more substantial issues.”
Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, who studies political misperceptions, said live fact-checking requires difficult judgments about what to correct and what to let slide.
“Live fact-checking is a balancing act,” he told AFP.
ABC News, which is hosting Tuesday’s debate, did not respond to requests for comment on whether its moderators will challenge Trump and Harris to back up their claims.
During the June debate, ABC featured PolitiFact debunks on its live blog.
Linda Qiu, a fact-checker for the New York Times, admitted that whenever the candidates face each other, fact checkers “They will always be minutes behind the action.”
His team also spends weeks gathering information and selecting candidate talking points to prepare for his live blog, he told AFP.
However, experts and fact-checkers agree that it is worth providing an accounting of what is and is not accurate, despite the delay.
“Our public service as journalists is to inform the public of the truth behind the rhetoric,” Glenn Kessler, chief fact-checker at the Washington Post, told AFP.
Still, one sad reality remains: “Every presidential candidate lies,” Kessler said.
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