It was the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and social media was abuzz with rumors of a surprise guest. Would it be Beyoncé or Taylor Swift? What about Mitt Romney or George W. Bush? Or the drug baron El Chapo, or the viral Olympic breakdancer Raygun? Okay, so the last two suggestions were jokes (served up by a HuffPost reporter and Sen. Ted Cruz, talking on Fox), but the others were serious, and serious reporters were soon dissecting them. Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, ruled out Bush (after Romney ruled himself out). For the most part, the speculation homed in on Beyoncé, who had, after all, already given Kamala Harris permission to use her song “Freedom.” On CNN, Jamie Gangel quoted a source “very familiar” with the schedule: “She’s coming. She’s not coming. She’s coming. I don’t think she’s coming. Wait—it may happen. It may not happen.” The Hill reported, citing sources of its own, that it would happen. So did TMZ. At one point, a White House staffer tweeted a bee emoji. Journalists circulated this, too, even as the staffer followed up that her six-year-old had been using her phone.
In the end, it did not happen; indeed, there was no surprise guest at all, as conventiongoers and the viewing public were forced to make do with Leon Panetta, Adam Kinzinger, and, of course, Harris, who rather selfishly headlined her own nominating party. (Though, given her rapid ascent to the top of the ticket, some journalists quipped that Harris was herself the surprise guest.) “The Hill, citing two sources, incorrectly reported that the music superstar would perform,” The Hill tweeted. “To quote the great Beyonce: We gotta lay our cards down, down, down,” TMZ tweeted, adding, “we got this one wrong.” The fact-checking website PolitiFact crowned the Beyoncé rumors “the DNC lie of the night,” adding, “You can’t bey-lieve everything you read online—especially if it doesn’t have named sources.”
This was an appropriate, if silly, end to a week in which facts and the checking of them played an outsize role in the discourse, at least among Very Online media critics—as speakers processed across the DNC stage, journalists at various outlets rated the veracity of what they said, and, often, critics charged that they were the ones who had gotten it wrong. It all started on Monday, when President Biden accused Donald Trump of having pledged not to accept the result if he loses in the fall and a reporter at the Washington Post described this as untrue, explaining that Trump “just hasn’t said that he would accept” and “previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.” The Post would find itself in the barrel again before the convention was over, as would PolitiFact, which was taken to task for, among other things, asserting that while Trump repeatedly tried to cut Medicare when he was president, he has said that he won’t next time (honest). The Times was criticized as well, including for earnestly fact-checking a claim by J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, that was self-evidently a joke. If the critics may have seen such Timesian behavior as beyond parody, the paper at least proved that parody is not beyond a fact-check.
In addition to ample litigation of the specific claims at issue, all this set in motion a debate as to whether fact-checking is fit for the purpose at all. In response to some of the criticism, Michael Scherer, a journalist at the Post, insisted that “details matter, even if the popping of ideological info bubbles stings.” But others disagreed. Chris Lehmann, the DC bureau chief at The Nation, wrote a piece describing real-time fact-checking as “the lowest form of journalism”; reporters seeing themselves as “above-the-fray priests of a higher empirical truth,” Lehmann argued, “could not be more ill suited to the Trumpified political age,” in which fact-checking can feel akin to “pointing out that your mugger’s shoe is untied while you’re pinned against the wall with a knife at your throat.” In a blog post titled “‘Fact-checking’ does a (hopefully fatal) face plant,” the media critic Dan Froomkin argued that “the concept of fact-checking is a noble one, but the way it is actually practiced does more harm than good.” Fact-checkers, Froomkin added, “are so devoted to not ‘taking sides’ that instead of exposing the vast gulf in truth-telling between the two parties, they effectively hide it.”
To fact-check myself, I should say that the debate over fact-checking was less set in motion this week than revived; indeed, it has been going on for a while. During Trump’s presidency, fact-checking was often seen as a high journalistic calling, though even back then, not everyone was convinced; in 2019, Ana Marie Cox argued in CJR that the exercise was overly bogged down in petty minutiae, and thus often missed the bigger picture. Earlier this year, I quoted from Cox’s column as I made the case that fact-checking had declined in centrality since she wrote, and suggested (with some nuance) that this might be a bad thing. (I was writing in the context of the Republican senator Katie Britt’s rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union speech, coverage of which was dominated by the weird vibes of Britt’s delivery until a dogged independent journalist pointed out that one of her core claims about immigration was laughably untrue.) In general, I stand by this assessment. And yet, this week, fact-checking felt centrally relevant again.
As far as the fresh contributions to the debate over fact-checking are concerned, I find things to like, and to like less, in all of them. (We might say that each is partially true.) As I suggested in the wake of Britt’s speech, checking facts is still a vital part of what all journalists should do, if not in the live-blog, claim-by-claim format lambasted by Lehmann and others. (Indeed, Lehmann wrote in his Nation piece that “actual fact-checking, as undertaken at this magazine and others, is a vocation I revere.”) Details clearly do matter, and—while I for one could do without the sanctimonious talk of “popping ideological info bubbles”—this is as true, in the abstract, for claims made by Democrats as it is for those made by Republicans; the latter may lie an awful lot more these days, but that’s no reason not to call out the former’s misstatements when they occur. It could reasonably be argued that blowing individual fact-checks out of proportion is the problem here, but to the extent that this happened this week, the critics of the fact-checks played a big role in highlighting them. If you weren’t online this week (lucky you!), you may not be aware of the controversy around them at all.
This being said, the critics of these individual fact-checks were often right to light into them for missing the mark. The one that chided Biden for his remarks on Trump and the election, in particular, was a mess; semantics about what Trump has said aside, we all saw what Trump did on and in the run-up to January 6, and suggesting that he is primed to do the same thing again this year is—at the very, very least—legitimate speech in the context of a political convention. (Indeed, an irony of this and other checks about Trump this week is that they relied on taking him at his word when fact-checkers—perhaps more than anyone else—have shown the extent to which he is a serial liar.) Nor do journalists need to police every joke. (I’m not planning to drag the HuffPost reporter for falsely stating that Raygun was the DNC surprise guest, nor Cruz for bringing up El Chapo—even if the latter joke was at least hiding a political message.)
It’s true that the format of live checking can encourage the treatment of claims in isolation, and that (whatever role the critics played in elevating its prominence this week) many outlets continue to devote significant reportorial resources to the format; it’s also true, as I wrote in the aftermath of Britt’s speech, that journalists shouldn’t solely evaluate claims based on some imagined, precise degree of truth. But as I see it, this week’s failures don’t reflect a fundamental flaw in live fact-checking per se—they were bad because they were wrong, regardless of the format—so much as the flaws in political journalism as a wider discipline. There is no reason that a given fact-check has to be credulous of Trump or ignore the crucial context of his past behavior. (Indeed, even critics of the live format acknowledge that it can be done well—and has been at times this week.) Similar can be said of really any given piece of political journalism. Some are sharp. Others miss the mark.
If the debate over fact-checking is much broader than Trump—especially in the week of the DNC—he is the main character in it because he is the candidate who is habitually, massively dishonest about everything from minutiae to the rules of the electoral game. If individual fact-checks can sometimes miss this reality, so can the piecemeal way in which political journalism is often organized more broadly. Overall, I’d say that major outlets have gotten better over time at using blunt language to describe Trump’s anti-democracy project—but as I’ve often written in this newsletter, such coverage has too often been siloed from other coverage that, at least implicitly, treats Trump as a normal candidate in a normal race. This is still true. Recently, a certain strain of punditry has suggested that Harris has moved away from highlighting threats to democracy toward highlighting “freedom” (see again: Beyoncé) and that this has been strategically smart. But keeping Trump’s threats to democracy front and center, or at least establishing them as crucial context, is important to the extent that they are true, not the extent that Democrats emphasize them.
Yesterday’s special-guest speculation was, by itself, relatively harmless. To the extent that it reflected a media pathology, it wasn’t complicity in the lie of the night, but a wider tendency to chase shiny objects and the unknown—and it’s this tendency, not any specific format, that can make coverage feel, to quote an infamous Harrisism, unburdened by what has been. If it’s true that Harris has pivoted in tone from Biden’s warnings about threats to democracy, she is still echoing them in substance; she did so in her speech last night, while the prior night’s programming majored on what Trump did on January 6 and might do again this year. Often, what matters most isn’t the surprise but the stuff that isn’t surprising at all.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Jaime Joyce checked in with a pair of college journalists whom she’d accompanied to the party conventions in 2016, while working as an editor at Time for Kids, to gather their thoughts on coverage of the 2024 race. The mainstream press dissecting memes can be “cringeworthy,” the pair told Joyce. “What they want is serious political conversation: sit-downs with the presidential candidates, questions about their records and what they plan to do, if elected.” In related news, Paul Farhi makes the case, in The Atlantic, that the DNC and this summer’s other major political events have shown that TV remains “the most important medium in American politics.” And Ezra Klein’s media moment continues: Charlotte Klein profiled him for New York magazine, while Clare Malone interviewed him for The New Yorker.
- Also for The New Yorker, Charles Bethea dug into the phenomenon of the “low-information voter,” a term for people who pay little attention to political news, among whom support for Trump is relatively high. The concept, one expert said, “sounds very condescending” but has been “extensively studied for decades: people vary in terms of the enjoyment they get out of searching for new information.” The term, Bethea adds, is “not a measure of intelligence, and, though it correlates with education level, it’s not the same thing: some low-information voters have college degrees. Whatever their education, low-need-for-cognition voters are less likely to seek out alternative views, and more likely to trust people they respect.”
- The Intercept’s Akela Lacy reports on a class action lawsuit alleging that police officers in New York City have illegally accessed juvenile records that should have remained sealed—and sometimes disseminated them, including to the press. “The suit, which was unsealed Thursday, alleges that officials routinely share those sealed records with prosecutors and the media—specifically with pro-cop tabloids that regularly publish juvenile arrest information sourced from police,” Lacy writes. “Legal advocates working on the suit said the practice of leaking sealed juvenile records was indicative of the NYPD’s broader disregard for civil liberties.”
- This week, the satirical publication The Onion returned to print for the first time in more than a decade, debuting a print issue in Chicago, its home city, to coincide with the DNC. The return to print has gone “unbelievably, shockingly well,” Ben Collins, the CEO, told the Post (though he didn’t disclose figures). “We’re saying, this is something that you’re going to really like, and, it can give us five bucks to make it every month,” Collins said, of the publication’s new offer. “We’ll put that into your house. And I think that’s a very back-to-basics thing that people want.”
- And FX set a November 14 release date for Say Nothing, a limited series based on a book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker, about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Deadline notes that the series will tell the story of various members of the IRA, and explore themes including “the extremes some people will go to in the name of their beliefs.” (I spoke with Keefe back in 2019, after his book came out; you can read our conversation here.)
ICYMI: On the DNC and the Gaza story
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.