Fact-checkers brace themselves for lie-filled debate as Trump faces Harris

WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s return to the debate stage has media organisations grappling once more with how to cover his frequent distortions of the truth.

Several fact-checking operations say they have been preparing for weeks ahead of the Republican’s face-off on Sept 10 against Vice-President Kamala Harris, their only debate currently scheduled before the Nov 5 election.

Ms Harris, a Democrat, will also face scrutiny over how she presents her and President Joe Biden’s White House record, as well as her own policy agenda.

CNN faced criticism for not issuing real-time corrections when Trump made a slew of false claims during his June debate against Mr Biden, whose poor performance ultimately led to his exit from the race.

According to the network’s in-house fact-checker, Trump made more than 30 such statements, including the baseless claim that Democrat-led states allow babies to be executed after birth.

Outlets including AFP and The New York Times, meanwhile, devoted outsized resources towards fact-checking the debate – and plan to do so again next week.

The Times focused 29 reporters on fact-checking the June clash – several more than it pulled together for Trump’s first debate in 2016 against Mrs Hillary Clinton.

US fact-checking website PolitiFact has assembled 27 journalists to cover the event, which editor-in-chief Katie Sanders described as its “biggest team ever”.

“We see our highest traffic on debate night, so we go all in with staffing,” Ms Sanders told AFP.

“For some voters, this is their only chance to receive fact-checking,” she said.

The non-profit has been hurrying to screen Ms Harris’ go-to attack lines ever since she entered the race in July, and is also examining which falsehoods Trump is most likely to repeat.

“What looks like live fact-checking on a debate night is actually drawing from days and weeks and months of consistent fact-checking of the candidates,” Ms Sanders said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that Trump regularly invents new false or misleading claims in addition to repeating old favorites, like his unfounded assertion of significant fraud in the 2020 election.

“There has never been a presidential candidate like Trump, who has deliberately used lying as a campaign strategy,” Northeastern University Professor Emeritus Alan Schroeder told AFP.

The Washington Post logged 30,573 false or misleading statements that Trump made during his term in the White House.

‘An impossible position’

Prof Schroeder, who authored a book on presidential debates, said misstatements on the debate stage used to generate mountains of humiliating news coverage.

A gaffe about the Soviet Union’s presence in Eastern Europe became a defining moment of Mr Gerald Ford’s 1976 election defeat, for example.

But Trump’s repeated lies have shifted the goalposts.

“In debates, this means dumping so many falsehoods into the dialogue that it becomes impossible to provide real-time corrections or context,” Prof Schroeder said.

Trying to insert fact-checks into the conversation without appearing biased puts moderators “in an impossible position”, he told AFP.

“Any amount of time spent refuting or clarifying erroneous claims during a debate is time not spent discussing more substantive matters.”

Dartmouth College Professor Brendan Nyhan, who studies political misperceptions, said live fact-checking requires difficult judgments about what to correct and what to let go.

“Live fact-checking is a high-wire act,” he told AFP.

ABC News, which is hosting the debate on Sept 10, did not respond to requests for comment on whether its moderators will challenge Trump and Ms Harris to back up their claims.

During the June debate, ABC featured debunks from PolitiFact on its live blog.

New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu conceded that whenever candidates square off, fact-checkers are “always going to be minutes behind the action”.

Her team also spends weeks gathering research and sifting through candidate talking points to prepare for their live blog, she told AFP.

Yet experts and fact-checkers agree it is worthwhile to provide an accounting of what is and is not accurate, despite the delay.

“It’s our public service as journalists to inform the public of the truth behind the rhetoric,” Mr Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s lead fact-checker, told AFP.

Still, a sad reality pervades. “Every presidential candidate lies,” Mr Kessler said. AFP