Trump-Harris debate: huge challenge for fact-checkers

(Washington) Should we highlight Donald Trump’s lies live? With the Republican returning to the stage of a televised debate Tuesday against Kamala Harris, fact-checkers are once again faced with the difficulty of the exercise.

In June, many criticized CNN for not having verified, live on the set, the repeated lies told by the former president in the face of Joe Biden, whose disastrous performance ultimately led him to withdraw his candidacy.

According to the American channel’s verification team, Donald Trump uttered more than 30 untruths on June 27, including the accusation, devoid of any factual basis, that American states run by Democrats allow babies to be “executed” at birth.

To meet the challenge, American newsrooms are investing significant resources.

In June, the prestigious New York Times had a digital investigation team of 29 journalists.

For fact-checking site PolitiFact, it was 27 people. “We have our highest traffic numbers on debate nights, so we go all-in on the numbers,” says its editor-in-chief Katie Sanders.

His team is preparing for Tuesday by reviewing Democrat Kamala Harris’s attack lines and Donald Trump’s regular lies. “Behind the live fact-checking on debate night, there are days, weeks of fact-checking the candidates every day.”

“Lies as a strategy”

But the problem with Donald Trump is that, in breaking all the rules of American politics, he regularly invents false or misleading claims, in addition to his repeated lies. He also keeps claiming, wrongly, that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

During his term as president, between 2017 and 2021, the Washington Post had counted 30,573 false or misleading statements from Donald Trump.

Now he’s back in the race for the White House, “deliberately using lies as a campaign strategy,” says Alan Schroeder, author of a book on the debates. “There’s never been a presidential candidate like Mr. Trump.”

And this professor emeritus recalls that in 1976, a factual error by Gerald Ford on the Soviet Union during a debate is seen today as one of the reasons for his defeat.

But Donald Trump, by “throwing so many untruths into the dialogue”, makes it “impossible to provide, live, corrections or context”, believes Alan Schroeder.

“All candidates lie”

And even if they did, doing so while trying to appear balanced would put the debate moderators “in an impossible position,” he said. “Any time spent refuting or clarifying erroneous assertions during the debate is time taken away from the substantive issues.”

ABC News, which is hosting Tuesday’s debate, has not said whether moderators will weigh in live on potential questionable claims. CNN did not do so in June, but its website carried PolitiFact’s fact-checks throughout the evening.

Short articles that debunk candidates’ untruths “always arrive several minutes later,” notes Linda Qiu, a fact-checker at New York TimesHis team has been working for weeks to prepare with the candidates’ talking points.

But, even late, “as a journalist, it is a public service to inform the general public about the truth behind the rhetoric,” Glenn Kessler, the head of fact-checking at the Washington Post. And to recall that “all the presidential candidates lie”.