Media figures are creating false balance in their coverage of the presidential debate by claiming both candidates lied. But the statements from President Obama they are pointing to are true.

John Fund of National Review and Jonathan Karl of ABC News both used factual statements made by President Obama as examples to claim that he “stretched the truth” during the October 3 presidential debate. Fund cited Obama's comments about the power of an advisory board created by the health care reform law, while Karl pointed to Obama's statement that he has proposed a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. In fact, both statements by President Obama during the debate were true, and have been supported by independent fact-checkers.

As a guest on CBS' Face the Nation Fund claimed “both candidates, I think, told things that stretched the truth.” Fund specifically criticized Obama for saying in the debate that the Independent Payments Advisory Board instituted by the health reform law “wasn't going to make any decisions on treatment.” According to Fund, that board “has unilateral power, unless Congress overrides it with a supermajority, to basically tell all doctors and hospitals this is how much money you have to treat people. That is incredible power. That is effectively the power to ration health care. So I think the President was stretching the truth in a big part of Obamacare.”

During the debate, President Obama disputed Mitt Romney's statement that the health reform law “put in place a board that can tell people ultimately what treatments they're going to receive.” Obama described the advisory board as “a group of health care experts, doctors, et cetera” who work “to figure out, how can we reduce the cost of care in the system overall? ... [W]hat this board does is basically identifies best practices and says, let's use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do.”

Obama's description is accurate. The health reform law forbids the board from submitting “any recommendation to ration health care ... or otherwise restrict benefits,” and multiple fact-checkers have made clear the board “wouldn't make any health care decisions for individual Americans” and “cannot by law make recommendations about what treatments people get.” Instead, according to Politifact, “it would make broad policy decisions that affect Medicare's overall cost.”

On ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Karl claimed “President Obama also was loose with the facts in the debate” because “he said he has a 4 trillion dollar plan to cut the deficit.”

Indeed in the debate, Obama said of his deficit reduction plan “we're putting it forward before Congress right now, a $4 trillion plan.” This is true. The budget proposed by the White House for Fiscal Year 2013 includes a plan to reduce the projected deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years.

This plan has been reviewed by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which confirmed that Obama's proposed deficit reduction plan would save $3.8 trillion over 10 years, excluding an additional $1.5 trillion of savings due to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The CBPP published a graph to illustrate the savings: