John McCain and Barack Obama respond to questions from debate moderator Bob Schieffer at their final head-to-head. Fact-checking: Does anyone care?

The debate had barely concluded when ABC News' George Stephanopoulos threw it over to reporter John Berman at the network's "fact check desk" in Washington.

"One of the more telling things in this debate was Joe the Plumber," Berman chimed in, "but as you noted, his name was Joe Wurzelbacher. John McCain got it wrong, calling him Joe Wurzelberger. And that was just the beginning."


Oh, yes it was, and the question has become: Has the drumbeat of fact-checks blended into white noise, letting significant misstatements and deceptions get lost in the mix?

In Philadelphia, the quibblers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Factcheck.org had posted five corrections on its "FactCheck Wire" (slogan: "Faster than the speed of spin") by the end of the debate. By 10:44 p.m., the Washington Post's blog "The Fact Checker" had checked in with 13 entries from the debate. And even though the server had gone down at PolitFact.com, the crew pumped out corrections and castigations on a frantic Twitter feed.

In all, the fact-checking was flying last night, as it has been throughout the campaign, albeit with limited impact on the candidates, who have continued to raise many of the same claims on which the watchmen have cast doubt.

"The one thing I worry about is by doing it the way we do it, putting up articles one after another, we reinforce the notion that all politicians are liars and it doesn’t matter who gets elected," said Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, which launched in 2003 and was the sole independent site keeping an eye on campaign dictum in the last presidential election.

"In 2004, Factcheck.org was considered [the] authority," said a senior McCain aide, who was provided by the campaign to speak about fact-checking on a not-for-attribution basis. He said he would "love to see it get back" to "fewer" fact-checking arms.

"It’s reaching a level of ridiculousness that demands some reconsideration of the role fact-checking should play," the aide said.

Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism said "politicians have become more assertive in challenging the press” and fact-checkers, at times even challenging their veracity.

While the fact-checkers have routinely discredited Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's claim that "I said thanks but no thanks" to the bridge to nowhere, the campaign has stood by it.

"I would think the answer to that is the basics they are using on fact and standard are not accurate," said the McCain aide. "We have put out, on numerous times, memos saying ultimately the final choice on the Bridge to Nowhere came down to Gov. Palin." He added that the campaign will "continue using that" assertion.

As another example of what he saw as the subjective considerations of the purportedly objective fact-checkers, he pointed to Factcheck.org outright mocking a Mitt Romney ad that offered the figurative claim that the next 10 years would bring more change than the last 1,000.

"We’re so hyper about fact-checking," the McCain aide said, "that you have candidates actually curtailing what they believe they can tell the American people."

Factcheck.org’s Jackson says the fact-checker’s mission is to put the facts out there and “let the chips falls where they may.”

“In theory, that can be a problem for us,” he said. “If only one candidate was distorting facts, we would look awfully biased. So far, it’s not a problem, although at the time [Rudy] Giuliani came along, we began to wonder.”

The Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs recalls a particular wrangle with camp Giuliani over a radio ad that claimed that only 44 percent of people with prostate cancer in England survive under their system of "socialized medicine."

"I talked to people at NIH and the National Cancer Institute and they told me that his statistics were flawed," Dobbs said. He awarded Giuliani a "four Pinocchio" rating for the claim, noting in a blog post that "the mayor seems to be making a habit of making sweeping statements with little or no factual support.”

The Giuliani campaign “found that shocking,” said Dobbs, “that a reporter would decide on his own authority which side is on the truth. I think it’s taken some getting used to.”

"For too long we were timid about fact-checking because we felt that calling something false would open us up to a charge of bias," said Bill Adair, the St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief and editor of PolitiFact.com.

"Factcheck.org has had a long history, back to 2004 and 2006," said Mindy Finn, chief online strategist for Mitt Romney's campaign. "I think it is highly respected and [its] people seem to be fair overall. I think one of the challenges with more fact-check sites out there, they tend to compete, and like any other kind of media, they are competing for eyeballs and there can be a problem with that."

"It is becoming wallpaper," says Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, echoing a sentiment shared by both of this year's presidential campaigns. "After a while, you get enough of a pattern on the wall you don’t even know it’s there."

“Are we succeeding in penetrating the electorate and getting people to understand what is true and not? I don’t know the answer to that one," Adair said. "I think we’ve done a great job in getting it out, and I do a lot of TV and radio, and the Web traffic is way, way up, so I believe there is more opportunity for people to see this stuff.”

Factcheck.org, for example, has averaged 200,000 daily unique visitors to its site since Sep. 1, and peaked at nearly three times that many the day after the vice presidential debate.

The McCain aide points out, though, that the majority of facts checked receive limited attention unless they are seized upon by one of the campaigns.

In this way, Castellanos says, fact-checkers “feed the effect they are trying to mitigate. They become bumper stickers for use in campaign ads.”

The usefulness of the fact-checkers, cited selectively of course, is a rare point of agreement between the campaigns.

"To the extent that you can say, 'you don't need to take my word for it, take the word of a bunch of smart guys that have no motive other than getting the facts right,' it helps make your case," said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.

The McCain aide agreed, saying "there is nothing better than quoting Factcheck.org or PolitiFact."