SPECIAL REPORT: How Fact-Checking Took Center Stage in 2008 Campaign

By: Samuel Chamberlain The fact-checkers have gone wild in the past two weeks, but even before Barack Obama and John McCain were officially selected for the final leg in the race for the White House, political editors and reporters had done some soul-searching, leading many to a new commitment to studying, and maybe correcting, the record when needed.

Bill Adair is the Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times ? and godfather of PolitiFact, a joint venture with Congressional Quarterly. It grew out of an idea that is so basic, yet not widely employed. "We felt that we had done a disservice to voters [in 2000 and 2004] where we were passing along claims about candidates that were not true, and feeling that it was up to the voters to decide," he says. "So, about a year ago, my editors came up with the idea of a Web site that would be a sort of daily journal and archive where voters could look things up and see if these claims were true."

Initially, Politifact's only tool was the Truth-o-Meter, with varying degrees: There's true, mostly true, half true, barely true, false, and pants-on-fire. The same rating system applies to The Attack File, which looks at mudslinging, chain e-mails, and more. But the feature that has driven Politifact to the forefront in this election season is the site's Flip-o-Meter, which tracks accusations of flip-flopping leveled at the two candidates.

The Flip-o-Meter pairs a candidate with an issue and awards them either a no-flip, a half-flip, or a full-flop (an example of the latter would be McCain on the Bush tax cuts or Obama on using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve). Adair reveals, "We just thought it was a useful service for voters ... that's the role of the mainstream media, I think, which is to be an impartial referee type, and tell voters what is and isn't true."

The St. Petersburg Times does not have the monopoly on fact-checking presidential candidates. The Washington Post has a Fact-Checker blog, manned by reporter Michael Dobbs and Research Editor Alice Crites. "Michael and I had worked on some stuff together during the 2004 campaign, and [this time] he proposed that we do it on a regular basis," Crites tells E&P. The blog, which started in September 2007, has generated many hits for the Post, and some controversy to boot.

"I remember we got absolutely slammed doing the story about Hillary Clinton and the sniper fire," Crites recalls. "Michael just thought it was a wildly exaggerated story," and it was. Fact-Checker gets tips from readers and from other reporters and editors. "Sometimes I look at census stats or health stats," says Crites. "Other times I call experts in certain areas. We try to use as authoritative sources as possible."

Other newspapers are in on the fun as well. The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., has started a fact-checking section for local elections. Politifact itself has been syndicated, running in both The Dallas Morning News and The Oregonian in Portland.

At USA Today's Candidate Match Game, readers answer questions on issues themselves, before matching them up with the candidate whose opinions are closest to theirs. Though it's not an actual fact-checking site, Match Game involves much of the same research as sites like Politifact. It's become one of the paper's most popular sites, and has been adopted by other Gannett newspapers. "I was on The Arizona Republic's page recently, and I saw that they had used the service, and I saw so many reader comments like 'Finally! Something I can use!'" says Laura Rehrmann, Gannett's managing editor/news.

This is all good news to Brooks Jackson, a former Associated Press and Wall Street Journal reporter and CNN correspondent who now serves as the director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, a branch of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. It assesses the facts mentioned in political advertisements at all levels, not just the presidential race. While Jackson applauds the efforts of others ? "I wish there were more people like Bill Adair, I could stop doing what I'm doing and go fishing," he says ? but he is emphatic in his belief that the media have a long way to go.

"The press ought to be much more aggressive than it is," says Jackson. "For a very long time, the press had been doing a lousy job of covering this main avenue of communication between a candidate and the voters. Newspaper reporters were either trying to imitate Theodore White [author of The Making of The President 1960], which tells you which staffers are getting fired and who's screwing who, but it doesn't tell you a thing about the candidate. The other option was covering campaigns the way campaigns have always been covered, with stump speeches and that sort of thing."

Without prompting, Jackson uses the same analogy as Adair to describe the role of the media in an election. "When I first started [fact-checking] ads, I was very surprised at how little pushback I was getting from campaigns," he says. "I came to the conclusion that they were almost relieved that someone was keeping an eye on them. They'd been rugby-without-a-referee for so long they needed somebody to step in and make them play by the rules.

"It's just not good," Jackson concludes, "when Americans go to vote that they do so with their heads full of disinformation that has gone unchecked by the only entity that has a special protection under the Constitution of the United States to investigate it. I mean, why have a First Amendment if you're not going to use it?"



On the trail, locally

David Skolnick is a Brooklyn-born political reporter for The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, a state that has gotten used to massive political coverage. E&P spoke with him the day after he covered a Barack Obama appearance in the Youngstown suburb of Austintown. In his report, Skolnick pointed out that Obama's speech was nearly identical to one he made the previous day in Lansing, Mich., and made a note of Obama's criticism of an energy bill that he voted for in the Senate.

Skolnick says that there are variables to consider for every campaign appearance. "Generally, the formula for doing stories like this is, you look for slip-ups, you see where the campaign is, you give response space for the other campaign, you rehash ... and you're done. But it depends on the candidate. When McCain was here in April, the appearance had a real 'Daniel in the Lion's Den' quality to it because of his continued support of NAFTA."

Skolnick says that checking for facts on the campaign trail for a small newspaper is very different from doing so in a bureau. "It's generally easier to fact-check local and state races than federal races. I have on a number of occasions brought various contradictions up to candidates ? I remember John Kerry almost yelling at me one time, and I have been yelled at before by various local candidates. Sometimes all you can do is ask a question, ask again if it doesn't get answered, and keep asking until someone at the back says, 'Next question.'"

The challenges are even more acute for very small newspapers in Ohio. David Trinko, senior content editor for The Lima (Ohio) News, spoke to E&P the day before a McCain appearance there. Trinko planned to send three of his six reporters to cover the event. By contrast, when George W. Bush came to Lima in his re-election campaign, eight reporters from the News were on hand. "There are greater demands on everyone," he admits. But Trinko said he was also concerned about the coverage of McCain: "We have to balance the rock-star mentality of having a big name in a small town, while still holding his feet to the fire. We've got to balance the what-did-he-have-for-lunch type of story with whatever issue comes up."

Despite the constraints, it would seem that campaign coverage has taken a step up in quality compared to previous cycles. Not so, according to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "The coverage of this campaign has been relentless, occasionally substantive, but usually trivial," he says, with just a touch of weariness in his voice. "It seems to me that the frivolous stuff, driven by the fact that we all have blogs, have occupied a larger space. We've lurched from Hillary's laugh to Obama's love of arugula to this silliness over Paris Hilton. All that added to the usual obsessions with polls and predictions has made it all very distracting.

"That's not to say that newspapers haven't done solid work," Kurtz continues. "I think newspapers do the best job of media of holding candidates accountable. I would say there's been largely nutritious coverage of this campaign, with a striking amount of empty calories."

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