Even trust in fact-checking is polarized

Hillary Clinton wants people to fact-check Donald Trump.

Her campaign lobbied the debate moderators to do it before the first matchup in September — although Chris Wallace, who is moderating the third and final debate Wednesday, has said it is not his role to be the “truth squad” — and Clinton herself has made a public call for it during the first two debates, directing people to her website, where her supporters have taken to fact-checking Trump in real time.

It’s clear that when it comes to truth, Trump is clearly in a category of his own; fully 71 percent of PolitiFact’s fact checks on Trump have been rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire. By comparison, 28 percent of Clinton’s statements have been rated the same.

But according to a recent YouGov poll, for Trump supporters it doesn’t matter how much the media, the moderators, or Clinton’s camp corrects Trump — 77 percent of Trump voters don’t trust the information provided by fact-checkers. Comparatively, 89 percent of Clinton voters believe the information being presented to them.

It’s not a particularly surprising statistic. A declining trust in institutions like the media paired with Trump’s repeated claims that the election — and the “liberal media” — is rigged against him don’t give his supporters much reason to believe the media’s claims that Trump is lying.

But fact-checking itself can be an inherently controversial and “risky” form of journalism, as Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of the book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, told me earlier this summer.

“Fact-checkers have to weather pretty vicious responses, because they are taking a side,” Graves said. “That is why it is so important for professional fact-checkers to scrutinize every politician — to make it clear they are independent of both parties. It is a particularly risky kind of journalism in that sense.”

Trump has struggled with the truth. During NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum, he repeated an old lie about how he opposed the Iraq War from the start. He also claimed Obama’s “rollback” of law enforcement policies have led to an increase in crime (crime has plummeted for decades), stated America is one the “highest-taxed” nations in the world (it’s one of the least taxed), and said Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment (she hasn’t said that). And so on.

At times, his false claims have perpetuated divisive and dangerous ideas. In the wake of the Orlando shooting in June, Trump claimed the shooter, Omar Mateen, was “born an Afghan” (he was born in America). He (baselessly) pointed fingers at the Muslim community for harboring terrorists. He (baselessly) insinuated that President Barack Obama had something to do with the attack. He (falsely) claimed the United States has no vetting process for Syrian refugees.

This has posed a real dilemma for those of us covering his campaign. But Graves argues that Trump is actually pushing journalism into a new era, emboldening newsrooms to be more aggressive in calling him out.

“This race is another turning point in the sense that journalists are thinking pretty openly in what they have to do to deal with a candidate like Donald Trump,” he said. “You see this in their complete embrace of fact-checking — not just in a dedicated sidebar or fact-check piece but actually in the straight news reports. That has always been rare but may become more common.”

Graves continued:

Journalists feel more comfortable challenging his claims publicly and directly. It is taken for granted that he is an unusual candidate. Pieces in the press openly compare him to demagogues in history, and he clearly has an unusual rhetorical style. That has really given journalists a kind of freedom that they haven’t felt in the past to directly challenge his claims.

But it also means that with more information out there, it is also easier for people to ignore the ideas that do not support their beliefs — and for Trump’s wild inaccuracies to find more of an audience.