Jacob Ogles
Will the State of the Union be fact-checked live on TV as it happens? The founder of Florida-based PolitiFact says the tech will be ready by 2020.
“People really want on-screen fact checks,” Duke University professor Bill Adair tells The Associated Press.
“There is a strong market for this, and I think the TV networks will realize there’s a brand advantage to it.”
Fact-checking sites have become both more popular and more controversial, especially since President Donald Trump’s entry into the political arena.
PolitiFact, owned by The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, has fact-checked 644 political statements by Donald Trump. Of those, roughly 66 percent ranked “Mostly False,” “False” or the dreaded “Pants on Fire.”
Most recently, PolitiFact graded a statement by the president there were “never so many apprehensions ever in our history” at the U.S. border as “False.” The site notes there were 1.6 million apprehensions at the Southwest border in 2000, but just 400,000 in 2018.
So if such a remark gets made during a State of the Union or presidential address, should on-screen captions immediately call that out on air?
Adair’s team, the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, plans before the next election year to offer real-time fact checking technology for debates and major speeches.
The plan would be to aggregate research available from PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. The product would be automated, triggered by certain phrases repeated often in political rhetoric. Adair said it might generate on-screen explanations of statements every two minutes.
Adair said focus groups already like early demonstrations of the service, put together by Duke using addresses by Trump and former President Barack Obama.
Of course, many cable networks host panels of pundits ready to question statements as necessary but usually do so after speeches. What would the reaction be to live chyron fact-checks?
The services themselves already come under criticism as biased, particularly in an age of polarized viewership for news.
RealClearPolitics has its own Fact Check Review site that aggregates pushback on such truth verifying services.
And there remains a general reticence among political reporters to call even verifiably untrue statement by the president out as “lies” or to shout “pants on fire” at a president. That was noted by Columbia Journalism Review after New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman immediately flagged statements by Trump on Twitter as “demonstrable falsehoods” last May.
Having analysts push back on the veracity of individual claims may generate interesting discussion after a speech, but how will viewers respond to a statement immediately being flagged as “false” live during an address?
The conservative Media Research Center suggested many viewers will read bias immediately in that type of service, which inevitably will undermine the president’s message.
“People aren’t going to trust you,” Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center, told AP.
“They know what the objective is. The objective is to ruin the president.”
