A Last Fact-Check: It Didn\'t Work

As so many media outlets promised, this was indeed the most fact-checked election in history. At any given moment during the past 18 months, there were so many truth squadrons in the air that mid-air collisions seemed a genuine possibility.

But as the campaign draws to a close, it's clear that it was the truth that ended up as a smoldering wreck. Without getting into a long tick-tock of untruthfulness, a pattern emerged over the summer and fall: both candidates' campaigns laid out a number of whoppers, got clobbered for doing so, and then kept right on saying them. Conventional wisdom suggests that the Romney campaign stepped across the line with more frequency, and we'd love to draw a conclusion from that, but it would involve fact-checking.

Let your mind drift back over the silly season for a moment, if you can bear it, and it's clear that baloney was on the menu almost every day of the campaign, often served with a cry of indignation from the other side. Yet the myths persisted: Mitt Romney more or less gave cancer to the wife of a fired steel worker who lost his insurance, and President Obama somehow shipped jobs to China by helping the auto industry survive. We could go on, but why bother?

“There are no consequences anymore,” said Mark McKinnon, a political analyst who writes for The Daily Beast and was a strategist for President George W. Bush. “It's like everyone's driving 100 miles per hour in a 60-miles-per-hour zone and all the cops have flat tires.”

Actually, there are plenty of people in hot pursuit. If the campaigns acted as if they lived beyond the thermodynamics of truth, it wasn't due to media inattentiveness. All the big national newspapers had major fact-checking initiatives and the moment speeches or debates ended on the cable networks, a fleet of scolds would descend and tut-tut about this fib or that. PoliFact, one of the progenitors of the movement, had a very busy season, as did FactCheck.org

And don't forget that social media sites, most prominently Twitter, served as a crowd-sourced pat-down on nose-growing statements from the campaigns.

Nothing was too minor or too ineffable to send through the crucible of truth. When the First Lady suggested that the president was “always ready to listen to good ideas,” an amorphous statement that doesn't exactly seem ripe for fact-checking, Fox News was undaunted and put the lie detector on her assertion. The thicket of observers putting the gimlet eye on campaign assertions became ubiquitous enough to present a comic opportunity for Bill Murray and College Humor.

And yet both campaigns seemed to live a life beyond consequence, correctly discerning that it was worth getting a scolding from the journalistic church ladies if a stretch or an elide or an outright prevarication did damage to the opposition. (And like pollsters this season, fact checkers were often accused o f being far from neutral, although when the guns were trained on their opponents, their status as political eunuchs was restored.)

Well, it may not be effective in a civic sense, but it is a hit in the ratings.

Paul Colford, a spokesman for The Associated Press, told Erik Wemple of The Washington Post: “Generally, our fact check pieces are among the stories that most frequently make online popularity lists, like the one Yahoo keeps. On those lists, they often outperform and outlast the mainbar stories to which they are sidebars.” According to Mr. Wemple, Ben Swann, a reporter from a Fox television station, ended up with more than 46,000 likes on Facebook for his fact-checking work.

Mr. Wemple pointed out to me that when debates kick up huge numbers, fact-checking what the candidates say will probably kick up a bunch of page-views.

Half-truths are now fully baked into political discourse and the public is inured to the growing forest of fibs, but people certainly seem to like watching the fact-check spanking machine at full speed. Fact checking, as it turns out, is more of a cottage industry than a civic corrective. In a highly divided country, partisans seek out proof that the other side is lying, sending it viral, but mostly in a way that lands on the choir. Back in August, Jack Shafer, the Reuters media columnist, called the exercise “a mugs game”, saying, “the growing sensitivity to political lies has less to do with more lying by more politicians than it does with the growth of the fact-checking industry over the last decade or so.”

And if the facts are not sticking, it's worth thinking about who is doing the checking.

“Let's not forget that fact checking is associated with the media industry, not exactly the most trusted institution around,” Mr. Wemple wrote in an e-mail. “Defying it can carry only so much risk.”

Because consumers can create their own mediated universe, they ca n program their intake in a way that confirms their biases, exposes their opponents as liars, and makes them feel like they are armed with the truth when they step behind the curtain on election day.