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Tag: fact checking
Chris Wallace And The Banality Of Conservative Dishonesty

Chris Wallace And The Banality Of Conservative Dishonesty

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace has received widespread praise for his performance as moderator of the final presidential debate, despite repeatedly injecting right-wing framing and misinformation into his questions. The celebration of Wallace’s performance highlights the extent to which conservative spin has become normalized in national politics.

Following the October 19 debate, commentators across the political spectrum praised Wallace for his performance as moderator. Wallace was lauded for his “blunt questions,” “evenhanded approach,” and “sterling performance,” and he was even described as the “one clearcut winner” of the debate.

Some of this praise is legitimate — Wallace repeatedly grilled Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on questions of policy and at times forced him to stay on topic in his answers. And the most newsworthy moment of the debate — Trump’s refusal to say whether he’d accept the results of the elections — came in response to Wallace’s pointed, repeated questioning near the end of the event.

But Wallace also exposed his audience to a large dose of right-wing misinformation:

  • His question about the economy began with the false premise that President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan damaged the economy.
  • His question about immigration took Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2013 comments about “open borders” grossly out of context.
  • His question about abortion access invoked the right-wing myth of “partial-birth” abortion, a non-medical term invented by anti-abortion groups.
  • His question about the national debt falsely alleged that programs like Social Security and Medicare are going to run out of money and add to the debt absent short-term cuts, echoing Republican talking points about entitlements.

Wallace also failed to fact-check Trump’s frequent falsehoods — following through on his promise not to be a “truth squad” during the debate.

Wallace’s rave reviews from Republicans and Democrats alike highlight the extent to which right-wing dishonesty — made ubiquitous by Fox News and conservative media — has become normal in national politics. Wallace’s network has spent years repeating and mainstreaming these types of lies — the stimulus failed, Democrats want open borders, et cetera. Viewers have heard them so often that it can feel passé to go through the motions of debunking them over and over. Journalists become so numb to the talking points that they can hear them being repeated by a debate moderator during a presidential debate without batting an eye.

That’s how political propaganda works — not by outright convincing people, but by treating a lie as so routine and unremarkable that people slowly stop being suspicious of it.

Journalists’ willingness to accept and overlook Wallace’s bullshit is even greater when it’s being compared to the absurdity of Donald Trump. When Trump is on stage claiming his opponent should be disqualified from running for office or suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, it feels nitpicky to worry about the misleading nature of many of Wallace’s questions. Trump’s unhinged, out-of-control campaign style makes everything around him seem normal and tame by comparison. We’re willing to forgive Wallace’s occasional dishonesty because we’re so grateful that he pointed out Trump is literally threatening a core democratic principle.

But becoming numb to Wallace’s casual, subtle dishonesty is incredibly dangerous. Fox News’ modus operandi is making right-wing misinformation so pervasive and constant that it becomes unnoticeable — it becomes part of the noise we just take for granted in American politics. What makes Wallace such an effective purveyor of dishonesty is that he’s good at playing the part of the reasonable, “even-handed” journalist, even when what he’s saying is wrong.

It’s easy to challenge bullshit when it’s being delivered wildly by Trump on a debate stage. It’s much harder to challenge it when it’s being subtly baked into questions from a moderator whose employer has spent years trying to blur the lines between serious journalism and right-wing fantasy.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Chris Wallace Supported Debate Fact-Checking Before He Was Against It

Chris Wallace Supported Debate Fact-Checking Before He Was Against It

By Brennan Suen

Fox News host Chris Wallace has said his role is to be “a timekeeper,” not a “truth squad” who fact-checks the candidates when he moderates the final presidential debate of this election on Wednesday. But that statement stands in stark contrast to Wallace’s previous effort to fact-check eventual Republican nominee Donald Trump while serving as a moderator of Fox News’ March Republican primary debate. Wallace even explained after that debate that because Trump frequently repeats the same lies, he had taken steps to ensure he could “fact-check him” “in real time.”

Shortly after Wallace was announced as the moderator of the final general election debate, Fox News host Howard Kurtz asked Wallace what he planned to do if the nominees “make assertions that you know are untrue.” Wallace replied, “That’s not my job. I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.” He later added that such “truth squading” is “a step too far.” He reiterated during an October 16 interview that he believes the proper role of a moderator is to merely act as “a timekeeper,” not “a participant.”

That stance undeniably helps Trump, who has an unparalleled history of telling lies throughout the campaign. Indeed, Trump praised Wallace’s comments, saying, “I think the candidates should police themselves.”

Wallace’s assertion contradicts his performance as a co-moderator of the March 3 Fox News Republican primary debate. During one exchange with Trump over the candidate’s economic plan, Wallace repeatedly said that Trump’s “numbers don’t add up,” stated that Trump was incorrect to say that one of his proposals would cut the deficit by “hundreds of billions of dollars,” and explained to the candidate — and the audience — that it “doesn’t cut the federal deficit.” Wallace’s exchange with Trump relied on what Washington Post media reporter Callum Borchers called “instant, graphical fact-checks” and “full-screen graphics” that “cast serious doubt over the feasibility of Trump’s [economic] plans.”

Borchers praised Wallace for producing “a memorable TV moment that will likely have people talking about his fact-checks after the debate.” The Post’s Erik Wemple similarly wrote that the “revolutionary” fact-checking graphics forced Trump to “look at the data” without being able to spin the facts.

Wallace himself even noted the importance of fact-checking Trump after the March 3 debate. During a March 10 interview on Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show, Wallace described the thinking behind the video fact checks, saying that “the only way you could catch [Trump] is in real time, in effect what the newspapers do the next day or the blogs do hours later, … fact-check him”:

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): You held his feet to the fire there, and it never added up.

[…]

CHRIS WALLACE: Here was the deal — and I’m glad you liked it, I must say a lot of people did — when you’re talking to Trump, he throws around a lot of numbers and you know, I thought, it was funny, there is a tremendous amount of planning that goes into these debates and I thought the only way you could catch him is in real time, in effect what the newspapers do the next day or the blogs do hours later, is fact-check him. There were about three or four things I knew he might say, like cut these departments, or we could negotiate a better deal on drugs, so I had these four full screens made up.

Chris Wallace is still moderating the debate. Donald Trump is still one of the candidates. The only difference between when Wallace thought fact-checking was vital and when he decided it was improper “truth squading” is that Trump’s opponent is no longer a group of Republicans, but Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

This debate may be the last chance a journalist has to ask questions of Trump before a national audience. But as Wallace’s own comments make clear, without vigorous, “real time” fact-checking, Trump will be able to lie to that audience with impunity.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

New Roundups Of Trump’s Lies Prove Why Fact-Checking Is Vital During Presidential Debates

New Roundups Of Trump’s Lies Prove Why Fact-Checking Is Vital During Presidential Debates

Published with permission from Media Matters For America

The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico all independently published on September 24 and 25 reviews of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies” in just the last week. Given that Trump’s “mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration” is so “frequent,” these reports of Trump’s “untruths” bolster the case for debate moderators to fact-check the candidates during the presidential debates.

Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are set to debate on September 26 in the first of three meetings. Given that Trump has a startling penchant for lying and that Trump’s debate prep team is filled with conspiracy theorists and disreputable political operatives, journalists and veteran debate moderators have called on the moderators to hold the candidates to a high level of truth-telling and fact-check their inaccurate statements.

Media Matters has also called on the debate moderators to fact-check the candidates in real-time, so a debate over settled fact does not become a “‘he said, she said’” situation. Failing to fact-check Trump’s lies during the debate will also feed into the growing media tendency to lower the bar for Trump and hold the two candidates to different standards.

Those calls for asking “tough follow-up questions” have been given even more importance with these new studies. Trump, according to a five-day Politico analysis of his most recent remarks, “averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds.” The Politico analysis found 87 different lies of Trump’s, including on issues such as the economy, health care, national security, immigration, and Clinton, among others. The study also noted Trump’s September 16 lie that “he was not the person responsible for the birtherism campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency.”

The New York Timesalso “closely tracked Mr. Trump’s public statements from Sept. 15-21, and assembled a list of his 31 biggest whoppers, many of them uttered repeatedly.” The Times spotlighted Trump’s “most consistent falsehood he tells about himself” — “that he opposed the war in Iraq from the start” — which the “evidence shows otherwise.” The Times also highlighted Trump’s “unfounded claims about critics and the news media,” “inaccurate claims about Clinton,” and “stump speech falsehoods.”

The Washington Postsimilarly examined “one week of Trump’s speeches, tweets and interviews” and found that Trump “continues to rely heavily on thinly sourced or entirely unsubstantiated claims.” The Post’s roundup of Trump’s recent “false or questionable claims” and “controversial and debunked statements” included his erroneous assertion that the black community is “in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever” and his false claim that law enforcement cannot question a person suspected of carrying an explosive.

Though print media outlets are becoming increasingly comfortable spotlighting Trump’s compulsive lying, his habit is not new: PolitiFact found that 70 percent of Trump’s assertions throughout his campaign have been “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire.” The Times, Post, and Politico’s roundups of Trump’s lying just in the past week show how crucial it is for debate moderators to be vigilant fact-checkers during the debate.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump walks off his plane at a campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., September 17, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Segar