Should Donald Trump’s lies be highlighted live? With the Republican returning to the stage of a televised debate Tuesday against Kamala Harris, America’s fact-checkers will once again be faced with the challenge of doing so.
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In June, many criticized CNN for not having verified, live on the set, the repeated lies told by the former president in the face of Joe Biden, whose disastrous performance ultimately led him to withdraw his candidacy.
According to the US channel’s fact-checking team, Donald Trump made more than 30 false statements on June 27, including the fact-free accusation that US states run by Democrats allow babies to be “executed” at birth.
To meet the challenge, American newsrooms are investing significant resources.
In June, the prestigious New York Times had a digital investigation team of 29 journalists.
For fact-checking site PolitiFact, it was 27 people. “We have our highest traffic numbers on debate nights, so we’re going all-in on the numbers,” its editor-in-chief Katie Sanders told AFP.
His team is preparing for Tuesday by reviewing Democrat Kamala Harris’s attack lines and Donald Trump’s regular lies. “Behind the live fact-checking on debate night, there are days, weeks of fact-checking what the candidates say on a daily basis.”
But the problem with Donald Trump is that, in breaking all the rules of American politics, he regularly invents false or misleading claims, in addition to his repeated lies. He also keeps claiming, wrongly, that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.
During his term as president, between 2017 and 2021, the Washington Post had counted 30,573 false or misleading statements from Donald Trump.
Now seeking to recapture the White House, he is “deliberately using lies as a campaign strategy,” Alan Schroeder, author of a book on the debates, told AFP. “There has never been a presidential candidate like Mr. Trump.”
And this professor emeritus recalls that in 1976, a factual error by Gerald Ford on the Soviet Union during a debate is seen today as one of the reasons for his defeat.
But Donald Trump, by “throwing so many untruths into the dialogue”, makes it “impossible to provide, live, corrections or context”, believes Alan Schroeder.
And even if they did, doing so while trying to appear balanced would put the debate moderators “in an impossible position,” he said. “Any time spent refuting or clarifying erroneous statements during the debate takes away time for the substantive issues.”
ABC News, which is hosting Tuesday’s debate, has not said whether moderators will weigh in live on potential questionable claims. CNN did not do so in June, but its website carried PolitiFact’s fact-checks throughout the evening.
However, short articles that debunk candidates’ untruths “always arrive several minutes later,” Linda Qiu, a fact-checker at the New York TimesHis team has been working for weeks to prepare with the candidates’ talking points.
But, even late, “as a journalist, it is a public service to inform the general public about the truth behind the rhetoric,” insists to AFP Glenn Kessler, head of fact-checking at the Washington Post. And to recall that “all the presidential candidates lie.”
