Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

It is a profound change in American journalism, and a welcome one. And it is gaining momentum at an astonishing pace.

The idea of news outlets calling balls and strikes on the nation's politicians — investigating their claims and declaring which ones are true and which ones are false — hardly sounds radical. Seems like what reporters should be doing. But it is a sharp departure from the way journalism has been practiced for decades.

Determined to remain objective, news organizations would generally steer clear of such conclusionary reporting. They would report Candidate A's assertion, Candidate B's response and call it a day. Safe, sure, but not very satisfying for readers, viewers and listeners who want to know where the truth lies.

The rise of the fact-checking movement over the past decade or so with the advent of FactCheck.Org and PolitiFact has helped fuel this cultural shift. But this campaign season, the amount of fact-checking by news organizations themselves has risen dramatically, with ample support from the public. A lot of the credit, of course, goes to Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump and his notorious aversion to the truth.

"This is my third presidential campaign, and the discussion of fact-checking and the amount of fact-checking is greater than I've ever seen," says Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact. She welcomes the competition from traditional news outlets. "I don't think fact-checking is just for the fact-checkers," she says. "Everybody should be fact-checking."

She began to see the uptick during the GOP primary, and Trump's propensity for ignoring the truth was a big factor (e.g., the false claim that thousands of Muslims in North Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attack). "People realized Donald Trump really needed to be aggressively fact-checked," Holan says.

Rieder: Tough, fact-based reporting on Trump

Consider a flurry of recent developments:

*Matt Lauer was pilloried mercilessly when he didn't challenge Trump's false claim during NBC's Commander-in-Chief Forum that he had opposed the Iraq War from the get-go. Such a reaction would have been unthinkable in the past. Debate moderator mainstay Jim Lehrer took the view that it was up to the candidates to knock down each other's inaccuracies. When CNN's Candy Crowley fact-checked Mitt Romney during a 2012 debate, it was considered a revolutionary act.

Matt Lauer gets rough reviews after candidate forum

*In the wake of the Lauer debacle, there were many calls for moderators of this year's presidential debates to fact-check the candidates. One of the moderators, Fox News' Chris Wallace, garnered negative reviews when he said, "I don't believe it's my job to be a truth squad."

*At Monday night's kickoff debate, moderator Lester Holt of NBC called out Trump for a number of false statements.

Rieder: A tough night for Lester Holt

*In the run-up to the debate, four news outlets — The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — published articles chronicling Trump's propensity for falsity. The headline of an article on this flurry by CNN's Brian Stelter called this "The Weekend America's Newspapers Called Donald Trump a Liar." This came after the Times raised eyebrows when it used the word "lie" in the headline over an article about Trump's false statements about where President Obama was born. It has traditionally been quite unusual for news outlets to use the word "lie" when referring to candidates' untrue statements.

It may seem that this is a lot of piling on Trump. But this isn't a question of partisanship. Evaluations of candidates' statements show the GOP nominee is far more truth-challenged than other politicians. PolitiFact, which is non-partisan and is an arm of the Tampa Bay Times, found 70% of Trump's statements it investigated were "mostly false," "false" and "pants on fire" compared with 27% for Hillary Clinton. FactCheck.org, also non-partisan and an initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, last December dubbed Trump the "king of whoppers," adding, "he stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong."

*Many news outlets aggressively fact-checked the Monday night debate. NPR published an annotated transcript of the entire conversation.

*A Monmouth University poll released Monday found 60% of Americans thought debate moderators should "fact-check a candidate who states false information during the debate," while only 31% embraced the traditional Lehrer view that candidates should simply fact-check each other. The problem with that approach is it reduces factual questions to he-said, she-said squabbles, leaving voters in the dark.

Rieder: Fact-checking pols in real time

The widespread acceptance of fact-checking is very gratifying to Brooks Jackson, the founding editor of FactCheck.org, which debuted in December 2003. Now the organization's editor emeritus, Jackson was no stranger to such reporting, having launched CNN's "Ad Watch" in 1992.

"I was saying back in 2004 that I thought it was a scandal that this sort of work was left to an itty-bitty Ivy League think tank when every news organization should have been doing it," he told me. "Now, many of them are." While Jackson warns of the dangers of "instant" fact-checking, he adds, "it is something of a turning point when (Lauer is) criticized for not calling out Trump on his claim to have opposed the Iraq war, when in fact he publicly supported it."

Bill Adair was the founding editor of PolitiFact, which launched in 2007. He, too, takes heart in the rise and spread of the fact-checking movement.

"Reports of the demise of facts are 'Mostly False!' " says Adair, now a professor at Duke and PolitiFact contributing editor. "Fact-checking has matured into an important form of journalism. In a chaotic media world, millions of voters realize they need an independent source for the facts."

He adds, "We know about the candidates’ falsehoods because there is now so much fact-checking. So it’s not that we’re in a 'post-fact' world — we’re in a world where a growing number of independent journalists are telling people what’s true and what’s not. That’s good for democracy."

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder