Who will fact-check the fact checkers?
by David Atkins
Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture at UCSB by guest lecturer Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of Communication and founder of FactCheck.org. The key thrust of her talk was that the prevelance of pseudo-objective “he said/she said” journalism, the trend toward increased spending in elections, and micro-targeted messaging meant that providing accountability for falsehoods in political advertising would become more and more difficult with each passing year. In that vein, she mentioned her involvement in the new Annenberg project FlackCheck, whose purpose is to ferret out misstatements and exaggerations in political advertising.
Of course, the challenge for any organization with this sort of stated purpose is to create accountability in a timely fashion so that campaigns and advertisers feel the brunt of public scrutiny. Leveraging the organization’s fact-checking capability to shame local advertising affiliates into taking off the air third-party ads filled with distortions and untruths was part of the goal, though Dr. Jamieson admitted that timeliness was a concern.
I applaud Dr. Jamieson and Annenberg for the effort, and for taking the fight to (to paraphrase the speaker) two generations of deconstructionists in academia who claim that there is no verifiable truth to be found in anything, only socially and liguistically constructed opinions. Certainly, demolishing that conceit is a fight worth pursuing in itself.
But as I pointed out in the Q&A session, there are two problems with the supposedly independent, objective factcheck model.
1) Quis custodet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers? Readers will certainly recall the Politifact lie of the year fiasco in which they claimed that Democrats and left-affiliated groups were lying in saying the the Ryan budget plan constituted an end to Medicare. According to Politifact, turning Medicare into a voucher system and vastly underfunding it doesn’t actually constitute “ending” Medicare–a bizarre opinion which has made Politifact lose much if not all of its credibility with thinking people. Putting too much power into the hands of supposedly objective groups doesn’t do much good when the organizations themselves either lack true objectivity, or lack the intelligence and common sense to use it.
2) Partisan traditional and new media groups are already doing most of the fact-checking, anyway. When I want to see what latest lies are coming out of the conservative media establishment, I don’t go to CNN’s “Keeping Them Honest” segment, or to anything or anyone affiliated with a non-partisan non-profit like Annenberg. I go to progressive blogs and to MSNBC. When I want to see what latest conservative attacks are coming down the pike, I likewise don’t rush to non-partisan media sources, but rather to conservative blogs and to Fox News. Both sides of the partisan divide and the campaigns themselves do a far better, faster and more accessible job fact-checking one another than do actual purported fact-checking organizations, if for no other reason than that they have the motivation and legions of willing crowdsourced volunteers to do so.
That’s not to say that independent media organizations should not exist to adjudicate competing claims. They should. But the principal accountability mechanism comes not from independent top-down organizations, but from bottom-up organic ones. In many ways, this is similar to the model of a modern courtroom: the judge exists not to judge the veracity or fairness of the claims made by the attorneys, but to ensure that the process functions smoothly and according to the law. It’s up to each attorney to put their best foot forward, and leave it to the judge/jury to decide the case. It’s fair to point out, though, that this model only works if each attorney has an equal chance to present their case. In modern politics, one side of the argument is usually vastly outspent, which makes independent organizations more necessary–but it’s still primarily the job of the opposition to cry foul when false claims are made.
That ground-up model also solves the micro-targeting problem. Even if campaigns target their false messages to narrowly circumscribed audiences, the chances that some denizen of the partisan blogosphere will notice it and propel it into the national consciousness is actually fairly high at this point. Heck, it’s hard to do an opposition research poll with a few hundred people these days without someone with an ax to grind taking notice and leaking its contents.
So kudos to Dr. Jamieson and the Annenberg Foundation for fighting the good fight. But I fear that the new media world is already rendering passe their model of accountability in advertising.
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