Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late

Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone unchallenged for so long.

A blizzard. A firehose. A blitzkrieg. All sorts of analogies have been used to describe Donald Trump’s penchant for seemingly endless, extreme falsehoods just about every time he speaks. So the bulldozing of facts in his historically long speech to Congress should come as no surprise. But that does not make the dishonesty any less dangerous. Millions believe him despite his record—helping the man who would be “king” amass even more power in what is supposed to be a democracy.

In the wake of Tuesday’s onslaught, mainstream news agencies—those whose leaders claim to be about journalism rather than partisanship—offered up fact checks. Unfortunately, these generally fail to make a dent in our political scene. I know because I spent years doing them both on air and online at CNN.

To understand why these fact checks have so little discernible impact, we need to think about the different audiences. There are those who already dislike serial liars and would never vote for them; for this audience, these fact checks preach to the choir. There are those who adore or support the liar; for them, these fact checks fall on deaf ears.

There also are millions of Americans who are not firmly in either camp and care deeply about the truth. Unfortunately, a great many of them have lost faith in large news organizations. In discussing why so many people distrust the media, journalists from big outlets are quick to blame Trump and other right-wing operatives. It’s true that today’s GOP has been largely overtaken by people who cry “fake news” about anything critical of Trump.

But there's another reason, which news executives refuse to acknowledge: Americans have learned that they cannot expect accuracy consistently from these news agencies. All too often, big media provide what I call “open mic nights.” They let politicians and pundits lie on air in live interviews with impunity.

In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode.

For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done. They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and fraud for the taxpayers.”

Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.

Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one watching that interview would know.

When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live? What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired them with fact checks?

Designing news to only contain the truth would be transformative and apolitical. I have shown dozens of examples of major news agencies allowing people from the left to spread myths about Israel, for example. I’m not talking about opinions or perspectives. I’m talking about easily disproved statements that fuel antisemitic beliefs.

Still, I’ve explained that it would be both-sidesism to pretend the two major parties lie equally. Trump’s duplicity goes beyond anything I’ve seen in politics and comes straight out of the dictator’s proverbial handbook.

What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth, always.

Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless lying.

Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.

---