A Fidelity to Facts

The presidential election had a clear winner: Donald Trump. But Kamala Harris wasn’t the only loser. There was another campaign fatality eulogized by the press: fact-checking. 

“Last Stand of the Pinocchio,” read a Slate headline on election eve. “It’s time to abandon the foremost symbol of journalistic impotence in the Trump era.” 

Having run out of superlatives to describe Trump’s persistent legacy of lies, many critics concluded that the fault was in ourselves. If fact-checking worked, his campaign would have failed or, at the least, the lies would have abated. It was a compelling argument, natural to journalists who seek results when exposing wrongdoing, not more wrongdoing.

“For a decade now, and with extra-special urgency amid Trump’s political reemergence over the past year or so, journalists have made the same arguments, deployed the same formats, and issued the same sorts of rebuttals, all under the presumption that at some point the sheer weight of accumulated evidence has to break through the walls of denial that Trump’s supporters have built up to shield themselves from apology and accountability,” Justin Peters wrote in the Slate article. “But the breakthrough never comes. The lies keep getting worse. And the media keeps relying on methods and formats that clearly no longer suit this desperate moment.”

The day after the election, I reached out to Angie Drobnic Holan, the most thoughtful person I know on these questions. When I first met Holan, she was the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. fact-checking site. After a year as a Nieman Fellow, she was named the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, where she now works with fact-checking operations worldwide. 

I was trying to understand how journalism’s Job One — the practice of verification — had lost its stature. I made the case against fact-checking. Holan had heard it before.

“It’s an argument that has been made about fact-checking for a long time,” she began. “I think it stems from misperceptions about journalism’s purpose and capacity.” 

For Holan, journalism has a special role to play in a democracy — truth-seeking inquiry, more akin to the fact-finding work of courts than to that of political advocates. Some critics of fact-checked campaign coverage complained that threats of autocracy demanded an activist’s stance from reporters, and criticized journalism for over-reliance on old tools that failed to convince voters. Holan wasn’t buying it. “I would not assign blame to journalists,” she told me. “Assign blame if you want to the Democrats who couldn’t defeat him.”

Holan has known colleagues for whom the rigors of fact-checking and prohibitions against advocacy have proven too restrictive and has seen journalists turn to the law or politics in order to push for specific outcomes. She understands why some find that preferable to living with the public’s verdict on fact-checking: “Journalists did a really good job of showing the lies Trump told and the people said, ‘we’ll live with that.’”

Holan thinks the press is “in for some dark times,” a prediction supported by the administration’s escalating attacks on journalism, including chilling rhetoric from Elon Musk who said of “60 Minutes,” “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This follows news from Mark Zuckerberg that Meta was ending some long running fact-checking programs, a decision likely to swell the very misinformation the programs were designed to limit. 

“I don’t think that’s going in the right direction,” said Bill Gates, the tech mogul-turned-philanthropist, in an interview with The New Yorker editor David Remnick. Gates, whose foundation is the world’s largest vaccine funder, has been a regular target of conspiracists on Zuckerberg’s platforms and provided a reminder that the stakes for fact-checking transcend journalism. “The fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety — boy, was that naïve,” said a weary-sounding Gates. 

Holan’s unshakeable belief in fact-checking held echoes for me of former Nieman Curator Bill Kovach and co-author Tom Rosenstiel’s writing on the essence of journalism. “In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art,” they wrote. “Journalism alone is focused first on getting what happened down right.” 

Almost 25 years later, we asked Holan to make the case for facts in the age of Trump. You will find her elegant argument for “preserving reality itself” in these pages.

“Trump is the historic table that has been set for us,” she told me in that post-election call. “If you’re looking for important work, there is so much to be done.” 

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