You have to get up early in the morning to put one over on Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center in Pennsylvania, and co-founder of FactCheck.org, devoted to decoding the fibs, fictions and verbal forgeries foisted on the public by politicians. But she admits she’s still taken aback by Donald Trump. This interview has been edited for clarity and length:

We’ve heard a lot of untruths from high-profile politicians. How different is Trump?

The fact that we are now in an effectively fact-free world with Donald Trump is the single most dramatic change in political campaigning I have seen any time in the history of the modern presidency.

Until now, when a candidate was called on a factual inaccuracy he would hunker down and try to spin why it wasn’t inaccurate, or try to overwhelm the discourse with so much advertising that it would overwhelm the corrections. He did not continue to make the statements to mass audiences on television.

A nightmare for fact checkers?

He makes so many misstatements so often that the process can’t continue to work. You don’t have enough news time to correct it all. And when he sees he’s getting a negative press he just changes the subject. He offers a new crazy attack. And the U.S. media, like lemmings, will rush to follow him.

But if even educated Trump supporters don’t care, can the truth become irrelevant to politics?

In our Voices of the Voters focus group of Trump supporters, a number said “no, he’s not really going to build a wall (across the Mexican border.) He won’t deport 11 million people. But I’ll vote for him anyway.”

I suspect they think that politics is so broken we need someone who will upend every notion we’ve got. “The politicians are telling us what we want to hear and we can’t believe them anyway. We have gridlock in Washington and we’re getting nowhere. Maybe Trump will do something. I don’t believe what he says, but it’s just a show.”

It’s a long way from the Watergate days, when the public looked to the media as the gatekeepers of facts?

We live in a world where there’s more work for journalists and less money for journalism. We’ve lost people who could stay in one beat for an entire career. You couldn’t fool them. They could write intelligent pieces that told the public what they needed to make a decision on an issue.

Now journalists have to file videos, podcasts, blogs, tweets, social media in addition to reporting. There are so many demands on the new young people that they don’t have time to develop deep knowledge about anything.

What’s missing is the capacity to sit down with a candidate like Trump on an issue and have the facts at their fingertips. Part of what happened in the primaries was that reporters who have grown up in this new era knew how to ask questions, but when the response was bizarre they didn’t know where to go to hold him accountable.

Even when he’s caught, Trump never regrets the error. Is his lack of shame the biggest problem?

Not just that. I don’t think he knows what facts are. A lot of the time what we’re seeing is ignorance. Look where he gets his “evidence.” He watches military “experts” on TV. He validates something from the National Enquirer. He retweets something other people have tweeted. Then he says “everybody says that.”

The most worrisome thing is does he have any knowledge of what is out there, factually and statistically? Time after time he’s misunderstood the policies that he’s indicting. Maybe it’s lying. But maybe he’s just extremely ill informed.

Either way, there’s no accountability?

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In some ways he’s accountable to the reality-based community. Because when enough pundits and experts point out, for instance, that you simply cannot walk away from the U.S. debt — that you’d completely destabilize the country, throw the world into a recession and put the credibility of the U.S. into instant question — he ultimately does come around to saying “no, it’s sacred.” And that he’s not going to do it.

But he hasn’t backed off all his positions — just the ones that have sustained the most critique by the highest number of experts over the most concentrated period of time

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