The Fact-Checkers’ Conceit

Ramesh Ponnuru @ NRO:

An incumbent president is facing a tough challenge from a Massachusetts politician who is even richer than he is, just as in 2004. For most of the year, pollsters have found that less than half the country approves of the incumbent’s job performance, also as in 2004. The challenger is again said to have trouble connecting with voters. Add another parallel to the list: Mark Halperin is convinced that the Republican candidate is stretching the truth more than the Democrat.

In October 2004, the high-profile journalist, who then worked for ABC, cited three other journalistic eminences to make the point that “the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done. Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win. We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.”

This August, Halperin, now working at Time, made much the same point on MSNBC. The names of the candidates had changed, but not the relatively dishonest political party: “At this point I think the Romney campaign is besting them in making these distortions and untruths a bigger part of their message.” His remarks made less of a splash this time around, but in both cases he was speaking for many of his peers in that large portion of the press that professes no explicit ideological commitments — and for even more of his peers in the most influential portions of that portion.

Halperin may have gotten less attention this time because so many reporters were already acting on his conclusion — now aided by the “fact-checking” institutions that have proliferated in the media between the two election years. Twice this year, the fact-checkers have turned up the volume against a politician for lying too much. The first target was Paul Ryan in his convention speech, the second Mitt Romney in his first debate with Obama. In the second case, the media’s take coincided, to say no more, with that of the Democrats. Romney having pretty clearly bested Obama, the Democrats were left with little to say other than that the Republican had done it by lying.

The conceit of the fact-checkers is that their claims are objectively true: A politician has said X, the truth is Y, and the size of the difference is the magnitude of the lie. Every stage of the fact-checking process, however, involves the exercise of judgment. The fact-checker must decide which claims to scrutinize and how harshly a misstatement should be treated. The media’s fact-checkers have also taken it upon themselves to interpret the intended impression a factually true statement is meant to leave, so as to grade the accuracy of that impression. Where judgment is necessary, bias is possible — and all the more likely when the fact-checker believes he is merely stating the objective truth, and when most of his colleagues perceive the truth the same way he does.

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