Brian from Michigan
It all started in 2012. I was the editor of the fact-checking site PolitiFact and a guest on Washington Journal, C-SPAN’s wonderfully wonky morning show. It features politicians, journalists, and policy experts taking questions from an amiable host and an unpredictable group of callers. Someone identified as Brian from Michigan called in to ask if it was true that Republicans lied more than Democrats. I said that we didn’t keep score.
That was a lie. PolitiFact did keep score by politician. You could navigate to their page and see a tally of how their claims had been rated. The pattern was easy to see: Republicans earned far more False and Pants on Fire! ratings than Democrats.
I lied to Brian because I was determined to show I was an impartial journalist and did not want to be accused of bias. That’s a common fear of fact-checkers. Although we have thick skin because of the nature of the work, we want to show that we don’t play favorites. I didn’t use that lie very often—usually I ducked questions by comparing my work to that of a baseball umpire—but this time, because Brian asked for the partisan score, I decided to lie.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.