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defrogNot to bang on about the Great Biden-Trump Debate Freakout, but one thing I noticed in my Twitter feed during the debate was that a lot of people complained that even Trump’s more blatant lies went unchallenged by both Biden and the moderators.
Fair point, though I’ll add that I think this is probably due to a couple of things:
(1) I suspect part of that is because we’ve normalized the idea that politicians lie or exaggerate about most stuff anyway, so moderators figire there’s no point in fact-checking them live – let ‘em talk and do the fact checks later.
(2) As someone who has moderated panel discussions (albeit not political ones), I would note that from a pure moderation standpoint, it’s actually hard to fact-check people to their face in real time during a live debate, not least because of the dangers of falling down enough rabbit holes that it ends up throwing the entire event off track. This is especially a problem with people like Trump who seem incapable of saying anything remotely true, potentially creating infinite rabbit holes.
(Apparently there’s an actual rhetorical strategy called the “Gish gallop” that is essentially a form of gaslighting by overwhelming your debate opponent with a firehose of nonsense so that they are unable to respond – though it’s also likely that this isn’t a deliberate strategy on Trump’s part so much as him just doing what comes naturally, but the result is similar.)
Anyway, given Trump’s general tendency to spout whatever pops into his head and the general deluge of disinformation swamping social media, it’s probably time for broadcast media and moderators to figure out a way to plausibly fact-check politicians in real time.
People like Daniel Dale do a pretty good job of this on Twitter, but that’s a separate medium that viewers have to actively check. Post-game fact-checks are fine, but also arguably too little too late for a lot of people. For viewers who are only seeing the debate coverage on TV, it would be good to figure out how to integrate that capability onscreen – like a fact-check ticker or something.
That said, the other challenge is the trustworthiness of the fact-checkers – I imagine the “facts” offered by, say, Newsmax and Fox would be quite different from those offered by CNN, etc. And then you’ll get into the whole thing where everyone says that “this media network is biased because they fact-checked my candidate more than the other one”.
So it’s not so simple, is what I’m saying.
Who checks the fact-checkers,
This is dF
