Mark Stencel is NPR's former managing editor for digital news. He previously held senior editing and executive management positions at the Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly. He is the author of a 2015 American Press Institute report on how political professionals are adapting to the scrutiny of media fact-checkers and co-author of a 2014 Duke Reporters' Lab study on obstacles to newsroom innovation (goatmustbefed.com).

The TV commercial started with a barrage of four-megaton words in all caps, all attributed to serious news organizations and read aloud in a disapproving voice:

“FALSE”


“MISLEADING”

“DEBUNKED”

“A WHOPPER”

“SHAKY CLAIMS”

“GLARING PROBLEM”

“FALSE”

“That’s what independent fact-checkers are saying about Mitch McConnell’s ads,” a second voice intoned. “He’ll say anything.”

Welcome to modern campaign warfare—where battles are fought in trenches filled with facts so muddy that even the fact-checking seems squishy.

Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes’ October ad targeting the Senate Republican leader during last year’s Kentucky Senate race was just one deployment of latest weapon on the political battlefield: media fact-checking used as both a shield and club—especially in campaign advertising.

Today politicians anticipate being “PolitiFacted,” as Rick Perry and Jeb Bush have both put it recently, verbifying the Pulitzer Prize-winning site run by the Tampa Bay Times. For a candidate, the delight in those moments when a fact-checker skewers an opponent is rarely tempered by the reality that they too will eventually find them selves in the same fact-checker’s unsparing gaze.

“If you get a good ruling, you can swing it like a cudgel at your opponent through the entire campaign,” one senior state Republican in Virginia told me. “And there’s little if any defense.”

In fact, fact-checking can be such a powerful weapon that campaigns are increasingly launching their own partisan fact-checkers, aping the journalists’ style, language and presentation in ads, news releases and social media postings. Just this week, Correct the Record—a group formed by David Brock as a “rapid response team” to defend Democratic presidential candidates from “right-wing, baseless attacks”— announced it was spinning off from its parent PAC in order to work more directly in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Clinton will hardly be the first candidate to circumvent the press with an overtly partisan fact-checking operation not dependent on the facts as the press sees them. But the blurring line between the work of journalists and their partisan doppelgangers seriously undermines media fact-checking’s ability to serve the political players who matter most—the voters.

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The fact-checking movement in political journalism began a quarter century ago to set the record straight and counteract misleading statements and negative campaigning. Today, that assignment seems to only be getting harder—especially given how fact-checking itself is now used by campaigns.

Because of my involvement in some primordial fact-checking projects as a young journalist at the Washington Post, and my role as an adviser to some later efforts, the American Press Institute asked me to research whether fact-checking actually keeps politicians in check. I’m still a believer in the form, but the answer is much muddier than it once was—officials now often perversely use fact-checking to spread falsehoods. The new question is whether fact-checkers can adapt what they do to the way people in politics have adapted to them.

Weaponizing fact-checks is just one of many ways politicians use and abuse fact-checking. One positive response is that candidates now vet their own messages, prepare background materials, dedicate staff to answering fact-checkers’ questions—and when called out on a particular comment or line of attack, they often adjust what they say going forward. But politicians also often “stand their ground,” after being told their pants are on fire—particularly when it comes to key strategic messages. Mitt Romney’s repeated attacks on President Obama’s international “apology tour” and the Obama campaign’s relentless focus on Romney’s time at Bain Capital were just two examples from the 2012 election where politicians refused to cower to fact-checkers.

“You just decide the fact-checker is wrong,” one Obama adviser I spoke to said.

But most of the time, people in politics do the opposite: They use fact-checks to validate or reinforce their position—and bloody their opponents. That was the case in nearly every reference to fact-checking I found in House and Senate debates and congressional floor speeches from 2013 and 2014. Of 83 statements (57 from Republicans and 26 from Democrats), only three challenged the fact-checkers’ findings. The rest used the fact-checks to label themselves as truth-tellers or their opponents as liars. But, even when using fact checks to attack a political rival, politicians frequently take a swipe at fact checking itself.

“Now, I do not always agree with the fact-checkers, who are sometimes wrong,” said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, as he referred directly to PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker to decry “egregious examples” of erroneous TV ads paid for by groups funded by the Koch brothers.

Likewise, Reid’s counterpart, McConnell, who is one the Senate’s most frequent users of fact checks, has been quick to disparage the media outlets that published them. Taking aim at Reid for misleading statements about Republican efforts to stall votes on judicial nominations, he twice cited “a fact­checker from a major left­wing paper”—a reference to a story published a few days earlier by the Post.

These same dynamics seem to be at play when politicians and their operatives deploy fact-tipped missiles in their campaigns. Fact checks are “very useful to campaigns when they’re on your side,” said Democratic political strategist Anita Dunn. “They’re most useful as a counter­offensive tool.”

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said fact checks are such effective fodder for political commercials that when campaign ad-makers want to use a “true” or “false” ruling from a journalism organization, he doesn’t always test the message on voters first, as is typically done. “It’s assumed that it’s going to have an impact,” he said.

The pollster, whose clients included Romney’s 2012 campaign, is less convinced that the journalists who dissect campaign messages have much direct impact on voters. “Nobody reads the damn newspaper,” he said. But when campaigns repeat that same newspaper’s findings over and over through the megaphone of paid political advertising, they sting.

“Just because something gets four Pinocchios doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Newhouse said. “It’s how you use it.”

That was clearly the case in West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, where in 2014 state Sen. Evan Jenkins used fact-checking to help end Democrat Nick Rahall’s 38-year career in the House of Representatives. Jenkins aggressively trumpeted fact checks in several TV ads that targeted his opponent, referencing stories from FactCheck.org, Time and the Washington Post, often with images of the stories and logos from the fact-checkers’ sites and mastheads.

“Nick Rahall’s attacks on Evan Jenkins: Non-partisan fact-checkers say they’re bogus, out-and-out lies, false,” a narrator said in one Jenkins campaign ad. “One ad so wrong TV stations rejected it. Nick Rahall: A lying politician, just like Obama.”

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Fact-checkers are keenly aware of how their reporting might be twisted by the campaigns they’re covering—especially in advertising. “It’s like it has the PolitiFact stamp of approval,” said Greg Borowski, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact Wisconsin team.

That stamp of approval is so attractive that campaigns will pretend they have it when they don’t—a tactic that muddies fact checking’s good name. For instance, early in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s 2014 re-election campaign, a Republican ad said Walker’s Democratic opponent, Mary Burke, “left Wisconsin with 130,000 fewer jobs” after her stint as the state’s Commerce secretary. A caption underscored the claim, attributing the data point to a five-month-old PolitiFact story.

But PolitiFact Wisconsin had instead given Walker a “mostly false” rating when he used that number the previous year. The ruling was a tricky one: PolitiFact found that Walker’s figure was “numerically true, but with scant evidence at best when it comes to blame,” since experts said broader, economic forces were at play, not just the prior administration policies.

“Numerically true” was apparently true enough for Walker’s backers. When it came time to fact-check the new commercial, PolitiFact once again called out the attack as “mostly false.” But in noting the “element of truth” in the ad’s claim, the fact-checkers illustrated the challenging difference between a journalism truth and a political truth. As one campaign operative put it to me, putting a fact in context is not his job: “Let the other guy do that.”

Grimes’ commercial against McConnell in last year’s Kentucky Senate race, was another particularly audacious example of this kind of facticide. The ad says McConnell would “say anything” to win re-election, and cited five fact-checks to prove it. But several of those news reports were double-barreled criticisms of both candidates. In one case, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler found that McConnell’s statements about Medicare deserved two Pinocchios, a mid-level falsehood on the newspaper’s accuracy scale. But Grimes’ statements on the same topic got four Pinocchios, the Post’s worst score.

Little of this is very shocking to people in the fact-checking business. They try to report when politicians and campaigns misuse their work, but prevention is a different matter. Adhering to the traditional sense that news is about informing citizens, not influencing political actors, many fact-checkers insist that changing how politicians and campaigns behave is not part of their job descriptions.

“I’ve never thought that success or failure should be measured by the effect it has on candidates and campaigns. It should measured by the effect it has on voters,” said Brooks Jackson, founder of the non-profit news site FactCheck.org, based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Jackson is the dean of fact-checkers, who first did this kind of reporting in regular on-air segments for CNN before launching his site to be a “consumer advocate” for voters in 2003.

“If you think you’re going to try to change a politician in a democratic system,” Jackson said, “they’re going to break your heart. This has gone on for 2,000 years.”

Jackson recalled a conference call with a senior adviser to a presidential candidate after a number of national news organizations, including his, repeatedly questioned the accuracy of attacks on their opponent’s voting record. The question concerned the number of times the candidate’s opponent had voted for something in Congress—a number the fact-checkers said was inflated because it unfairly included procedural votes.

“What’s the right number?” Jackson recalled the adviser pleading, wanting to find a figure that the fact-checkers would accept.

“They don’t pay me to write your ads,” Jackson responded.

FactCheck.org’s model inspired much of what PolitiFact and the Post’s Fact Checker did later, as well as the state and local news outlets that have followed suit in their markets. And many of those journalists share Jackson’s belief: The candidates’ behavior is not their concern.

“I don’t write this stuff for politicians,” the Post’s Kessler said. “Politicians are going to do what they’re going to do. The point of the fact checks is to inform voters.”

***

Some of the people who first championed more aggressive fact-checking had higher hopes than that for its effects on the political process. The idea that intense scrutiny could raise the political cost of peddling blatant falsehoods still seems reasonable to me—even at a time when media audiences are fragmented and public trust in news people is so low that it rivals the politicians they cover. If anything, fact-checking can be a differentiator that builds trust and audience.

But not everyone in journalism sees it that way. Some news people, much like their counterparts in politics, have concerns about the true/false rating systems that most fact-checkers use. They worry that playing referee forces reporters to take sides, or that fact-checkers nitpick and depend on false balance to try to avoid appearing partisan.

Others argue that fact-checking should be an even more integral part of everyday reporting—not isolated on dedicated sites, boxes, segments and blogs or limited to campaign coverage. As the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once asked former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, “When did fact checking and journalism separate?”

If there was a particular moment, it was the early 1990s. That’s when I got hooked on fact checking—or “truth-squadding” as we sometimes called it back then. At the time I was an early 20-something news researcher for Washington Post columnist David Broder and the political staff on the newspaper’s National desk.

Truth-squadding was already a routine element of the Post’s reporting, particularly its White House coverage. But after the negative TV ads that dominated the 1988 presidential campaign, Broder began writing a series of articles and syndicated newspaper columns advocating for more focused efforts, particularly aimed at TV ads. Broder called this his personal “‘crank’ crusade to improve the tone and increase the substance of our political campaigns.” For him, fact-checking could be a form of “sleaze control.”

The Post newsroom, along with a number of others, met Broder’s challenge with gusto. In the run-up to the 1990-midterm elections, the Post began an increasingly regular series of ad-watch boxes called “30-Second Politics.” The first I could find in the archive ran that February—though it was about an ad that New Jersey Democrat James J. Florio aired five months earlier, during his 1989 campaign for governor. The Post’s fact-checking called out Florio’s use of a newspaper headline to incorrectly suggest a news report validated an earlier Florio attack ad and provided more context on other claims.

The template of that first 30-Second Politics item remained roughly the same for many years, with screen grabs from the ad, a transcript and a certain amount of reportorial prose—a mix of analysis, explanation and fact-checking broadly labeled “Background” or “Context.”

Arriving at the Post in 1991, I contributed some reporting to these often free-standing, pre-Web “charticles.” We also experimented during the 1992 campaign with other forms of truth-squadding, some of which we wove into daily stories and some of which appeared on the page as stand-alone fact checks. We created a searchable, in-house database of the candidates’ public statements—speeches, interviews, debate transcripts and so on. Having that info at our fingertips meant we could zero in on almost any of the candidates’ past public remarks on deadline without having to do multiple searches on various commercial data services. That was a big deal back in the days of screeching 1400 baud modems and dot-matrix printers.

The database allowed us to quickly generate text boxes that showed how a candidate’s positions or statements had evolved over time. One focused on how President George H.W. Bush tried to avoid using the word “recession” to describe the economy. Others looked at the evolution of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s statements on his marijuana use and his draft status during the Vietnam War. And after Bill Clinton’s election, the database helped me compile a full-page list of the new president’s campaign promises, which I was pleased to see taped up over a couple of the cubicles in the old White House press room, even several years later.

We also could do real-time fact-checking as the president-elect shifted from campaign mode to governing mode. When Clinton complained at a news conference that he had “no idea who led you to believe” he would have a legislative agenda ready for Congress before he was even inaugurated, we could immediately find the TV interview where he had said just that seven months earlier.

***

I never lost my enthusiasm for truth-squadding. After a stint working as reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, I returned to the Post to help launch what became the company’s first website in 1996—an election-year online partnership called PoliticsNow. It combined resources from the Post, Newsweek, ABC News and later National Journal and the Hotline. One of our election-year features was “The Debate Referee”—an illustrated character in a striped shirt embedded throughout the text of our debate transcripts. Each referee linked to related fact checking, including original reporting and summaries of the truth-squadding from the other PoliticsNow partners.

PoliticsNow shuttered a few months after the 1996 election, but I stayed at the Post as a digital editor and executive—and I made sure the Debate Referee survived, too, making appearances on washingtonpost.com in 2000 and 2004.

The presentation of fact-checking in the Debate Referee was one of the features that founder Bill Adair said inspired his vision for PolitiFact. I was an informal adviser to Bill when he launched PolitiFact in 2007 (he still calls the site’s promise-tracker, the Obameter, “the monster you created”) and when I moved to NPR to be the digital managing editor we joined forces again on a partnership called “The Message Machine.” I’ve also been an advisory board member for PunditFact, a PolitiFact offshoot that focuses on media commentary.

PolitiFact and the Post Fact Checker opened for business in 2007. FactCheck.org is four years older. Each was innovative when they launched, building on even earlier efforts. Maintaining the relevance they’ve earned in the political process requires them to keep building and innovating.

Much of the R&D focus in the fact-checking community has been tech-oriented, including efforts to develop news services that could automatically flag possible falsehoods for voters in real-time—while watching an ad on TV, for instance, or listening to a debate. But there are less technologically challenging ways that fact-checkers can increase their influence with a wider range of voters—and even enlist their help.

Academic research, including a series of new studies like mine also commissioned by the American Press Institute, has busted myths about how the voters that fact-checkers aim to serve perceive their reporting. To take voters’ biases into account, fact-checkers need to experiment with alternate story forms that will make their work more persuasive to those who are otherwise inclined to disregard their it.

Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan—one of the scholars whose work has helped fact-checkers understand how readers absorb their reporting—flagged a particularly good example in a 2012 Columbia Journalism Review story. It was a “choose your own adventure” news essay by Boston news site BostInno that looked at the controversy over Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital. Business editor Walter Frick used very basic HTML to create a “step-by-step guide to the facts, tied into whether or not you need to actually care, depending on your assumptions.” By letting readers navigate his well-chosen collection of facts and conflicting arguments, Frick not only conveyed key details but illustrated the reasons why partisans on both sides would see those details so differently.

There are other tactics fact-checkers can employ. Either on their own or working together, they could systemically police TV ads and other political material for references to their own work, watching for times when their findings have been misrepresented. That’s what happened after a Republican presidential debate in 2011, when Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann asserted that PolitiFact had reviewed her performance at an earlier face-off and found “everything that I said was true.” PolitiFact looked back at what it had actually reported and rated Bachmann’s new claim Pants on Fire. Meta-fact checks like that may feel a bit self-referential, but if the newsrooms that invest in this reporting don’t defend the credibility and accuracy of their own work, no one else will.

Fact-checkers also can look for ways to tap their audience for help—not as commenters at the end of a story but as contributors. This goes beyond asking readers, listeners and viewers for story ideas. Instead they can help collect the ads, direct mail, social media messages and unscripted moments at public events—the raw material fact-checkers need to do their work.

In my review of hundreds of fact-checks from the past several campaign cycles, it was revealing how many fact-checkers based their reporting on versions of TV ads that had been recorded by non-journalists and posted on YouTube. Since campaigns are often selective about what they post on their public websites and social media feeds, fact-checkers should find ways to encourage this kind of public reporting. “Citizen journalists” do their best work when given specific assignments. As media habits become more diffuse and targeted, fact-checkers will need the help. And enlisting voters as news gatherers will give them a direct stake in the results—making it that much riskier for politicians to weaponize the findings.

This last point would have thrilled Broder, who always trusted his readers more than many journalists. He would have been among the most eager to see journalists find ways to use technology to recruit their readers, viewers, listeners and users into the fact­finding process. In a 1979 speech at the National Press Club, Broder anticipated the kind of collaborative reporting that many of us in digital media talk about now. He urged his colleagues to remember—and remind their readers—that their newspaper is at best “a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours.”

Then he added:

“If we did that, I suspect, not only would we feel less inhibited about correcting and updating our own stories, we might even encourage the readers to contribute their own information and understanding to the process. We might even find ourselves acknowledging something most of us find hard to accept: that they have something to tell us, as well as to hear from us. And if those readers felt that they were part of a communications process in which they were participants and not just passive consumers, then they might more easily understand that their freedoms—and not just ours—are endangered when the search warrants and subpoenas are visited on the press.”

Just as Broder rightly saw the emergence of fact-checking as an important development in political journalism, the ongoing importance of this work will depend on how news people recognize and adapt to new political tactics. If politicians are allowed free reign to distort the findings of fact checking, the public’s trust in the practice will be damaged, perhaps irreparably. If, instead, fact-checkers challenge those distortions, engage their audiences as collaborators, and make their reporting more relevant and accessible, the political cost of being on the wrong side of their Truth-O-Meter scale and Pinocchio ratings will increase. As consumer advocates, that’s the best way for fact checkers to serve their primary audience, the voters. And that means the politicians will have to pay attention, too.

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This story is derived in large part from reporting for a newly released study on political behavior that journalist Mark Stencel wrote for the American Press Institute’s Fact-Checking Project.