Note to media: For heaven’s sake, fact check Trump’s team
Week after week, Trump administration officials repeat the same bad information on Sunday morning talk shows. It doesn't have to be this way.
When the big TV news networks book Trump officials and surrogates for their flagship Sunday political talk shows, there's one thing they can count on: Those guests will absolutely, definitely lie.
It’s bad enough that these networks insist on interviewing politicians live, rather than pre-recording and only sharing fact-checked versions with the audience. The very least they could do is research their guests’ favorite falsehoods in advance -- the ones these politicians bring up all the time. That way, if and when the guests make those claims, the host could be ready to respond with something like this: “Actually, you say that a lot, but it’s not true. Here are the facts.”
But even this is too much for legacy media. Instead, guests steamroll their way through live broadcasts and say pretty much whatever they want. And each year, those news programs apply for -- and sometimes win -- journalism awards. The whole thing is bonkers. (They should instead win what I call Media Fail Awards.)
For a case in point, see this week’s This Week. The ABC program had as a guest Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s so-called border czar. (Various administrations have used the term “czar” colloquially, but given Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, some people want to avoid using such terms now. The problem in this case is that that appears to be Homan’s actual title.)
It took Homan no time to bring up what seem to be his favorite false claims: that under President Joe Biden, the United States “had a 600 percent increase in sex trafficking women and children” and had “a quarter million Americans die from fentanyl overdose because of open border [sic].”
No and no. I have previously fact checked his wild claims about these two topics on my podcast and newsletter, They Stand Corrected.
Homan says things like this all the time, but they have no basis in truth.
No data anywhere suggests a big spike in sex trafficking during Biden’s presidency. This horrific scourge takes place largely in the shadows, and groups that focus on it say it’s impossible to know the numbers. Under Trump, the website for U.S. Customs and Border Protection still cites general global estimates from 2017. Meanwhile, virtually everyone convicted of human trafficking is a U.S. citizen. And the number of successful convictions went up after Biden took over from Trump.
As for fentanyl, the overwhelming majority that enters the United States comes in through legal ports of entry and is brought in by U.S. citizens. Very little of it comes through illegal crossing points, which are what “open border” refers to. Under Biden, the nation saw a historic drop in overdose deaths in the 12 months leading up to September 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And, by the way, Trump recently claimed that 300,000 people a year die from fentanyl, so did Homan just contradict his boss?
ABC, of course, said nothing about any of this, and instead just continued with the show. The net result of this kind of thing is that people hear lies and accept them as fact. (This Week averages about 2.5 million viewers.) They may not remember specific numbers, but they’re left with the impression that Biden sat by while fentanyl and sex trafficking exploded, and that Trump is trying to clean up Biden’s messes.
Meanwhile, across the Sunday talk shows, Trump’s team came prepared to bring up violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants. In some cases (like on CNN’s State of the Union), they specifically cited the horrific case of Rachel Morin, who was raped and murdered.
On my podcast, I often explain that truth requires two things: facts plus context. It’s true that Morin’s convicted attacker was in the country illegally. The attack is a nightmare.
It’s also true that the man convicted was caught attempting to enter the country and kicked out three times before he succeeded in 2023, according to The Baltimore Sun. But many people here illegally arrived in Trump’s first term. His border policies “let more immigrants sneak in,” according to the libertarian Cato Institute. Also, people here illegally are less likely than the overall population to commit crimes. And there are people here illegally who have saved lives in acts of heroism.
If you saw any of the Sunday talk shows bring up this context when Trump’s team kept pushing the idea that illegal immigrants engage in widespread crime, let me know.
Some people question whether it’s even worth trying. Are we in a post-truth world? Won’t people just believe whatever they want? My experience with They Stand Corrected gives me hope. There are people across the country, of different walks of life, who want sources they can trust. They want and need truth.
It’s time for big media, with massive budgets, to reform. Do the job, always. That's the role the media should play in protecting our democracy.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
Thanks for posting this, The Contrarian. It's ridiculous that news agencies don't even fact check the most predictable, most obvious lies! Folks - send me links to media failures you see, for the podcast and newsletter, over at https://theystandcorrected.substack.com Thanks.
The problem is twofold. First, for the past 20-25 years the MSM has been far more concerned with clicks and profits than journalism. Second, these talk shows like "This Week" want their guests to come back (so they look fair and balanced), so they won't fact check them. Do you think Mike Wallace, Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite would ever have the Felon or his sycophants on their news hours or 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace would be confronting them every day with their lies. Today's "journalists" believe one has to present "both sides" of any issue, even when there is only one side of an issue ("there were good people, on both sides").