 Okay, good afternoon. My name is Tom Glazier, and I'd like to welcome you to the New America Foundation, to what I hope and expect to be a fascinating discussion about fact-checking and misinformation. It's part of our Delvin to 12 series and grows out of some work that we've done on fact-checking and misinformation over the last several months. I need our work here on media policy as part of a team housed within New America's Open Technology Initiative, where we have been considering how the changing media and technological landscape affects citizens' participation in a democracy. There have been many reports about journalism and media over the last few years, including the Night Report on Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age, the Dianne Shudson Report on Reconstructing Journalism, and the more recent FCC report, which was led by Steve Wolburn, and I believe there are a couple of people in the audience who contributed to that. The Night Report starts in the premise that individuals need three things to participate in a democratic society – relevant and credible information, the education needed to engage with that information, and opportunities to participate. Our event today focuses on the first of those three items – relevant and credible information without facts or, if we can see it more now, with misinformation and trumping facts, our democratic processes are at risk. It is with this in the back of our mind that we have undertaken a programme of work that has resulted in the release of the three reports which you may have picked up on the way in. The reports address, respectively, the modern history of fact-checking. Michael Dobbs, the founder of the fact-checking pop column at the Washington Post, wrote the first. He subtitled this, How Reagan Inspired a Journalistic Movement. Jason Rifler and Brendan Nighen have co-authored a paper on the search findings from Social Science, and Jason will join us on the panel today. Don't get too optimistic about what he has to say. It seems our minds aren't easily inoculated from misinformation. Lucas Graves and I have added to this and crafted a paper built on the search that we've done and research provided by Morningside Analytics that provides some analysis of the fact-checking universe as it stands in late 2011, early 2012. So our event today will begin with Lucas describing our work. This will be followed by a panel and Q&A, moderated by Steve Carl, the president of the New America Foundation. Before I start, I should mention that this event is being live-streamed, and everything is on the record forever, or at least, as I've already said, as long as Google Anonymous or WikiLeaks can find it. For those on Twitter, please use the hashtag DelveInto12. During the Q&A, please do also wait for the microphone. As I mentioned, we have an online audience, and we want to make sure they can hear us. So without further introduction, I'd like to invite Lucas Graves to the podium to share his thinking. Our fax, our paper, but Lucas, our fax alive and well in 2012. Thank you, Tom. So what I'd like to do is just frame the discussion that we'll have today with some of our research about the media footprint of fact-checking, but I thought I would take just a moment or two at the outset to talk about what exactly the new class of fact-checker does. There's been a lot of confusion, a lot of discussion lately about how fact-checking differs from and how it relates to traditional journalism. I'm sure many of you read this column in the New York Times from public editor Arthur Brisbane, asking whether the time should be a truth vigilante. Brisbane said he wanted to ask readers for input on whether and when New York Times reporters should challenge facts that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. Now, based on the fairly heated response to this column, his readers seem to think that that's what the newspaper was supposed to be doing all along. But in fact, in practice, fact-checking, the new kind of fact-checking, begins where traditional journalism leaves off for the most part. And we can talk about why that's the case and if that has to be the case. So let me just give you my version of a day in the life of one of the new fact-checkers, which starts precisely with scouring traditional media for claims that politicians make. These are the most fishy things they say that go unchecked. So here's a typical example, which is courtesy of factcheck.org. This was a Times piece from last March reporting on a speech given by Mississippi Governor Haley Barber in the third paragraph. Barber made a pretty bold claim to slam the Obama administration. He declared that in the last two years, the federal government had spent $7 trillion, even as the economy lost 7 million jobs. And he added a little witticism. I guess we ought to be glad they didn't spend 12 trillion. We might have lost 12 million jobs, a punchy point. And one that is almost a perfect example of what fact-checkers call checkable facts, which they spend a great deal of their time looking for and harvesting from conventional news outlets. The reason it's a perfect example is that, first of all, it's pretty clearly not a matter of opinion. Secondly, it's a numerical claim that's based in hard data that can be checked against an authoritative source, in this case, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And third and most important, I think, from the time that I've spent watching various fact-checking groups, it involves a major political figure who at that time was considered a possible presidential contender. You know, political fact-checkers, like political journalists generally, see their core mission as informing citizens who are facing choices at the ballot box. So a quick trip to the BLS website would have revealed that, in fact, Barbara had basically doubled the actual job loss statistics. So the next day, fact-check.org ran this piece. Fairly bluntly contradicting Barbara's claim explaining that he had grossly exaggerated the nation's job losses under President Obama. Barbara is dead wrong about job losses in the last two years. He's not even close. So this is the kind of ruling that fact-checkers make. To back this up, the report or this piece linked to two different sources of government data. It linked to a transcript of Hailey-Barber's speech and it linked to the New York Times piece that had reported on the speech the day before. It did not, interestingly, call out the New York Times for failing to challenge this very easily checkable claim. And I think that's typical of the mainstream fact-checkers who don't spend a lot of time criticizing their colleagues in the mainstream press. Instead, they just concentrate on filling in the gaps. So this is what the new fact-checkers do. They rule on claims that political reporters either don't have the time to analyze or don't feel comfortable weighing in on. Now, we can have a long conversation. I'm sure we'll touch on this today about why they don't feel comfortable weighing in on these questions. I think the answers are more complex than critics sometimes maintain. But the other really important thing that fact-checkers do that they spend a lot of time doing, though I hope you don't mind that I picked this older photograph, is that they try to get as much attention as possible for their work, especially in traditional print and broadcast news. For fact-checking to make a difference in public discourse, for it to be able to name and shame politicians into giving up misleading claims, political actors have to pay attention. And there's good reason to think that that's most likely when the media, especially the traditional media, large-scale print and broadcast outlets are paying attention. And that's where things get interesting, because as any fact-checker will tell you, once it's out there in the wild, their work is immediately subject to some pretty intense partisan filtering. Politicians and pundits talk up the fact-checks that they like and they ignore or dismiss the ones that they don't. And you can see this clearly in the media footprint of different fact-checking groups. So this is a chart showing how different broadcast networks, different cable and broadcast networks, cited various fact-checkers over the last three years. It's based on Nexus searches. So in blue, at the top, you see citations by MSNBC in red or orange at the bottom. You see citations by Fox News. And in the middle, in various shades of sort of green-grey, are the traditional objective news outlets like NPR and CNN. I realize not everyone agrees with that designation, but they consider themselves objective journalists. And what's fascinating is that nonpartisan fact-checkers like Politifact and factcheck.org get the great bulk of their attention from nonpartisan news outlets. So that's the great big gray swath in the middle of the two bars on the left. In fact, both Politifact and factcheck.org get a fifth or less of their attention from the openly political outlets, Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. Meanwhile, the politically-oriented fact-checkers and media critics, like Media Matters, which goes after what it calls conservative misinformation, and Newsbusters, which goes after liberal bias in the media, get the great bulk of their attention, more than two-thirds, from those partisan news outlets. So they're really speaking to the echo chamber. What's fascinating, though, is that this partisan attention actually crosses the political divide. So Media Matters for America, for instance, which is the third bar, gets even more attention on Fox News, which is the primary target of its critiques, than it does from its allies at MSNBC. Now, the same basic phenomenon can be seen in the online footprint of these different fact-checkers. You can read about this in our report. I'm not going to explain in detail the methodology depicted here, but this is a map of the blogosphere's conversation about political fact-checking. Like the blogosphere itself, it's divided into two very distinct political hemispheres. So sort of in blue on the left, you see progressive and liberal blogging clusters, and in various shades of red and pink on the right, you see there are conservative counterparts, the conservative blogosphere. And if you look at the map of attention to particular fact-checkers, you see the same kind of politicization. So here's a map of the sites that pay attention to Media Matters, which, again, is dedicated to combating conservative misinformation. And you can see that it penetrates really deeply into the liberal corners of the blogosphere, and it draws just a small but intense core of attention from the conservative side of the blogosphere. That's almost certainly critical attention, negative attention, people disputing Media Matters findings. And in contrast, let me emphasize the contrast again, newsbusters on the right penetrates really deeply into the conservative blogging world and gets a little bit of attention, again, doubtless negative attention from liberal sites. So here's a distillation of, and again, this is in our report, of that same data across the board for a variety of fact-checkers and media critics working online arrayed according to the degree of partisanship of the attention that they get online, the sites that link to them, the bloggers that talk about them. And you can see pretty clearly that the fact-checkers that are dedicated to being non-partisan, like PolitiFact and The Washington Post, fact-checking column, and factcheck.org have actually done a pretty good job of speaking to both sides. So they're right there in the middle of the conversation, getting attention from both sides, whereas the more openly political fact-checkers are off on the margins. Now, the really interesting question that I think we'll talk a little bit about today is what happens as these fact-checkers become embroiled in political controversies? Can they maintain that central position, or will they be pulled to the margins of the conversation? So, for instance, as I'm sure Bill Adair will be happy to talk about, PolitiFact has come under a storm of criticism lately from liberal figures in the media and on blogs, and the question is how that affects its footprint and its influence. It's a question, I think, that affects all of the non-partisan fact-checking groups who have to resist or try to resist being pulled into these sort of political media wars so that they can continue trying to make a difference in public discourse. Thank you. Okay, I'm not sure who's responsible for the chair arrangements, but why don't we have the panelists come up on stage. I'm Steve Kahl from the New America Foundation. I'm your friendly moderator today. I'm going to have a conversation and invite you to join it in just a little while. I thought I would just listening to Luke's good work just pull back a little bit and reflect on why we're interested in fact-checking, particularly in this election year, and why we're interested in New America. And I think there are a couple of reasons, though many different perspectives in the group up here come to the subject from lots of different angles, but I thought I would mention two for myself. One, of course, as a journalist and thinking about journalism and the crisis in journalism, what's interesting about the fact-checking movement, the self-conscious groups that have sprung up, political fact and fact-check among them, is that it's really, you could argue, it's the first organic response by journalists to the crisis in their own business. This was the idea that there is a self-conscious fact-checking movement on the land was not a sort of top-down initiative of media company owners or even universities and nonprofits. It grew out of kind of a marketplace and a history for this dedicated truth-telling and watchdogging that predated the business crisis in journalism, but then accelerated as a response to it, I think, among a lot of journalists. And so the question is where is it going? Is it a durable movement? Does it have a role that is similar to the kinds of roles that mainstream media newsrooms claim for themselves in earlier eras? What are its limits? And it's just an interesting subject because it's the first time that something constructive has emerged from journalism about journalism since the crisis in business models really accelerated after 2007. And then I think the second and perhaps more relevant reason we're interested here in this election year is because we live in a post-citizens United World and we know that enormous amounts of money are flowing into our political discourse, often without accountability attached to them, often invested in distorting ads that are directed at voter behavior and where various kinds of factual or putatively factual claims are made. And there's a question of whether our public square, our citizenry, our institutions can hold the falsehoods and the arguments that are made with this surge of money accountable, clarify them, help voters make sense of them, and also whether as social science it's possible to even interfere with the distorting effects of negative advertising. And all of that is sort of on the table, I think, for the conversation today. And let me start with the social science. Actually, why don't you all just introduce yourselves rather than me make a long piece of it. Jason, why don't you say a word about why you're here and the work you do that's relevant to this conversation. Okay, my name is Jason Reifler. I'm an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University, GoPanthers. And I've done a lot of work with my co-author, Brendan Nyhand, who's at Dartmouth College. And we started a research program several years ago trying to get at the question of when people have factual beliefs that are incorrect, is it possible to correct those factual beliefs? And our first study came up with an unfortunate answer, which was no. And not only is it no that in some cases correcting people can actually make factual misperceptions worse. We've subsequently done a little bit more work, and we have some glimmers of light on the horizon that there may be ways in which we can improve factual beliefs. But we are still in the early stages of really trying to figure this out. And it's a big challenge ahead. So the research you're doing now is designed to determine whether there are kinds of messaging that not only avoid the reinforcement syndrome that you documented in your first study, but might actually change people's perceptions? Yes. And are you testing out a variety of hypotheses about how that might work? So there are a number of different ways in which misperceptions may be especially difficult to correct. Some of them have to do with how human memory works and how people encode information when they receive it and how difficult it is to correct that. Some of it has more simply to do with presentation of information. So in a paper that we're still working on that we hope will be published soon, we found that giving people information in graphical form has proven in our three studies to be a reasonably effective way to try and get people to accept factual information. It also seems that one of the things that makes people so resistant to factual information is that as psychologists would say people's self-concept is tied up with the factual beliefs that they have. And when you directly try and challenge those factual beliefs, it brings to mind defense mechanisms to try and prevent their self-concept from being attacked. It can be very threatening to say things that you think are very important about the world. And if you're somebody who cares about politics, being told that your political beliefs are incorrect, it's the type of thing in which you are likely to say, whoa, not so keen on that. And so we start investigating how buffering people's self-esteem can make them more open to counter-addictional information. So we're building off of a very active research paradigm. So one last question then we'll move down the line. In a citizen's United World, it's commonplace even before Citizens United, it's commonplace in professional political advertising to assert, I assume on the basis of evidence, that negative advertising works. This is a fundamental belief in the political consulting business. In what way that's relevant to your investigation does negative advertising work as a matter of fact? In other words, is the distortion of facts central to its effects or are there other ways in which it's demonstrated that such advertising strategies are effective? That's a very large question. Well, so give me a very short answer. So the very short answer is negative ads are effective and there are a variety of reasons why they are effective. And where do lies fit in that palette of reasons and effects? I'll have to get back to you on that one. Okay. All right, so Bill, you've been around the fact-checking business for more than this cycle and there's been an enormous amount of attention paid to the advertising strategies of the super PACs simply because of the running room that they enjoy in this cycle as opposed to previous ones. Start by saying a little bit about your work, Tom alluded to it, but tell us whether this cycle feels different than the last couple that you've been in. In what ways is your contestation with candidates and interest groups, your work different and to what extent is it familiar to you from the 08 and earlier cycles? Sure. I'm Bill LaDaire. I'm the editor of PolitiFact, which is a project of the Tampa Bay Times, formerly the St. Petersburg Times. I am also the Washington bureau chief for the Tampa Bay Times. PolitiFact started five years ago because we wanted to try something new on the web and try a new media initiative and focus on fact-checking. This grew out of my own guilt. I had covered political campaigns and felt that I had been a passive co-conspirator in passing along inaccurate information and hadn't fact-checked it the way I should. I went to my editors with a proposal that we would create a website where we would do fact-checking full-time and we would rate the statements on a truth-o-meter from true to false. We later came up with our low, even lower, rating pants on fire. We now have 10 state PolitiFact sites employing about 35 full-time editors and reporters. There are 35 PolitiFact journalists around the country who have published now a total of 5,000 truth-o-meter fact-checks, which I think makes us the most prolific fact-checking organization maybe in the history of journalism. That's not a high bar in that I don't think there's been that much fact-checking until Brooks Jackson got fact-checked started in 2003. To answer your question, Steve, it does feel different and it's really interesting. In 2008, when we started, 2008 presidential campaign was our first campaign and we focused exclusively on that and we were focused naturally on the candidate committees. That's where most of the action was. There was some independent groups that were speaking up. There was also this chatter from chain emails that we've all gotten from our crazy uncles that say things like Barack Obama's a Muslim and he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance or wear a flag lapel pin. We checked a lot of those and those were actually important messages in the 2008 campaign. If you talk to Kathleen Hall-Jameson at the Annenberg School, those are going to play a big role again this year. But what is definitely different this time are the super PACs and other groups that are really becoming so much the surrogates for the candidate committees and are being used to do the negative advertising in the same way that really the candidate committees used to do that in the past. We just looked today, there's an ad, just went up today in the Super Tuesday States attacking from the pro-Gingrich super PAC and I can never get them, I can never remember them. They both end in our future and one of them is restore our future and the other is saving our future or something. This is the pro-Gingrich one. But what's different is there is less accountability of course of who is spending the money for these groups. But really the art of the campaign commercial is the same and the fact check is very much the same and in some cases these super PACs will actually provide some backup materials to try to justify their claims. The one point I guess I would make about negative advertising and then we can talk more about this in the future later on is negative does not necessarily mean wrong and one of the things that we did when we started Politifact was to do fact checking that acknowledged some things were true and what we try to be guided by in selecting what we fact check is if you as a viewer hear something and wonder is that true and if you're going to ask that question, if we ask that question then we're going to try to answer it. If we decide through our research yes it's true and we rate it true we'll still publish it and one of the things about other kinds of fact checking is it has kind of been limited to zingers like let's get them only when they get something wrong and and we see our mission more as let's answer their let's satisfy their curiosity and if it's true we'll say so and the result of that is another feature of Politifact which is the report card you can look at anybody's report card and see how many true mostly true etc ratings they've gotten and so I think there's value in that because if you're seeing that restore a future ad and you're wondering is that true and you see that we've said it is that that empowers you as a voter. Well we want to talk about this lie of the year thing but maybe we'll do that a little bit later if we heard from the others while we're on this subject do you find that there's any difference in the impact you can create if one of our interests here is to defend the public square defend fact-based discourse as a basis for voter decision-making and political competition and your role is contributing to that do you find that there's a difference in the impact you can create online and in the way people hear your work when you are calling out a politician who has directly spoken something false in a speech or the debate on the one hand versus ad watch work on the other hand which is murkier sometimes difficult to even access all the ads that are being broadcast since they're not routinely distributed and so in any event you do both you call politicians out on claims they make to each other or before audiences and on the other hand you try to track the advertising piece but almost feels like the advertising piece is a tsunami that is very difficult to to do anything more and stick your toe in it is absolutely and there obviously if we call someone out on words they spoke at a campaign event they're much more likely to react to us to respond to give us their backup materials to back it up with the campaign ads it's it's a much more calculated decision I'm sure the you know the producers have huddled in a dark room you know making these ads often in a matter of an hour or two these ads are often made very quickly and they've made a calculation what do we got they put it up there and I think it is a calculation we're going to do this and you know political fact and fact check they're going to hit us but let's take it because we want to get that message out yeah so I think it's much more of a calculation we've had you know fair number of examples where people when we give them a false or a pants on fire will say oh I'm sorry I didn't realize that was wrong or I misspoke or whatever and and they will you know correct themselves and we don't see that very often for campaign ads right exactly yeah so Wendell your background is a little bit difficult to describe I think Tom likes to say you've come over from the dark side to help clarify for the rest of us what goes on over there but say a word about your own professional background what you're doing now in think tank land what kinds of concerns you are and then talk to us about your perception of how the media is actually doing in the face of the misinformation campaigns that are mounted by private industry individual corporations or political groupings that are that are funded by private interests to what extent realistically is the media making a dent in these strategies right I didn't always work on the dark side in fact my first career was a journalist myself and I was a reporter here in Washington and covered Congress in the White House for a few years and I did a little bit of I guess you would say fact checking to a certain extent five days a week I was a reporter but I got a chance to write analysis pieces on the weekend and I would try to put things in context and go beyond traditional reporting and what I would write on the weekends for Scripps Howard News Service I spent my longer career though in public relations and wound up in the health insurance industry where I spent 20 years first with Humana and then with Signo Corporation and I was head of corporate communications at Signo when I left my job after a crisis of conscience I finally dawned on me that what I was doing for much of my job and not just for Signo but for the industry was often that the exact opposite of what I was trying to do as a journalist I felt that when I was a journalist I had an obligation and tried to report fact much of the time admittedly it was a he said she said kind of a story but again I always tried to make sure that I was reporting what I thought to be true and on the weekends try to put things in the context and call out things that weren't necessarily truly been said on the House for the Senate floor or in the White House I left in 2008 not knowing what I would do I just knew I didn't want to keep doing what I was doing I had been apart for many years of efforts to influence public policy I spent quite a bit of time down here working with trade associations for the insurance industry and in coalitions that were put together and trade the front groups that were created to try to influence public opinion for the purpose of influencing public policy and I just realized I was doing the wrong thing I was I clearly was on the dark side and I more or less you were good at it and I was pretty good at it I mean I was I could have probably coasted out my career and had a pretty cushy retirement I guess if I'd stayed there but I left in my late 50s and and it was after going to see something that I never would have thought that I would be seeing in this country that kind of jolted me that was a kind of an epiphany epiphany that made me have this crisis of conscience in the first place I was I was having doubts about a lot of what I was expected to say about the insurance industry before I had this epiphany but I didn't have the I guess the final push to make me really confront it I went to back to visit relatives in Tennessee and and visited a health care expedition as it was called a few miles from where I grew up in southwest Virginia and it was I read a story about it in my hometown newspaper that I used to work for many years earlier about people expected to be coming by the thousands and driving five and six hundred miles away to get care that's being provided free by doctors and nurses who were providing care for over three days I went there out of curiosity I had been working on a position paper a white paper for the insurance industry that was to try to persuade people that the problem with the uninsured was not so much of a problem after all if you slice and dice the data in certain ways you can make people think that a lot of people are uninsured because they are that way by choice they just don't want to spend the money to buy coverage but what I saw when I went to this health care expedition was people who had jobs who would love to have had coverage but they couldn't afford it or they couldn't get it at any price because of the policies of the insurance industry refusing to sell people coverage with because of pre-existing conditions many of these people work for small businesses that couldn't afford to offer coverage anymore to their employees and these people were getting care that's being provided in barns and animal stalls and it looked like something you could never have imagined seeing in the US people lined up by the hundreds waiting to get care in barns and animal stalls and under tents soaking wet because it was raining and and these were the real long lines part of my job in the industry was to try to persuade people that you don't want to have anything to do with the system like a Canadian system or a system in the UK where people have to wait long periods of time to get care these people were waiting hours and hours to get care in barns and animal stalls they were waiting once to once a year when this event came to Wise County Virginia so just to take you to this kind of campaign cycle and the media's performance in it you know from that very powerful kind of conversion experience when you're now back on the other side identifying with journalists and citizens in the face of these strategies what do you see about the limits of their effectiveness or the strength of the of the strategies that you left behind in corporate communications the media has I think is very ineffective in pointing out incorrect information and being able to challenge it when I was in my my job in the industry increasingly what I was able to say went unchallenged at the beginning of my career there were more reporters who were doing investigative reporting who were really looking in and covering the health care industry or health insurance industry much more aggressively but by the time I was no longer of the tour the end of my career even the New York Times was not bothering to cover the earnings announcements of the big companies and very few reporters would ever challenge anything that the companies would put out there and it was certainly that way in the in the political arena as well and I noticed that certainly during the debate on health care reform there was very little investigation of things that were being said during the debate and one thing I learned as I spend a lot of time here in Washington on Capitol Hill and also observing media coverage is that there's very little understanding of how the commercial insurance industry operates on Capitol Hill most members of Congress don't have a clue and most reporters don't either reporters often are fairly junior or just don't have the time to really come to understand the topic they're covering before I invite Chris back in Bill just to follow up on that observation how often do you find that checking corporate communication is relevant to the mission you've sort of assigned yourself explicit corporate communication we've done it we've done it when it has involved a major public policy issues such as the banks and particularly the auto companies and the bailout and in that case we've checked claims by the heads of GM and Chrysler about claiming they had fully repaid their loans and I think in both cases I think it was a half true or maybe a mostly false and to me this is a you know another area where where there needs to be more journalism I agree with Wendell I think when I look at the amount of scrutiny that that companies are getting not just in healthcare but in so many industries the because of the depleted ranks of journalists there just aren't as many smart reporters who have the time to to learn what they need to learn and ask tough questions and so you know we should be fact checking them too right now Chris I'm not sure how many folks here have a sense of the context of the work they presented but there are papers I think out on the table this project of research that Chris has been leading we're very fortunate to collaborate with him I mean Lucas sorry that Lucas had is a PhD candidate or a PhD holder candidate at Columbia University in the communications department and was already engaged long before we took an interest institutionally in the subject in mapping the fact checking universe in the United States and trying to understand it as a as a sort of element of journalism did some very interesting field research in Philadelphia I believe yes and in DC and and so these papers that are coming forward now over the last couple of weeks are really an attempt first to just document what's happening and map it and because there really hasn't been a sort of objective effort to describe how this movement is emerging what its shape is and the very rigorous database work that Lucas has led us through with help from morning analytics or morning side analytics is fascinating so I those of you who have a professional reason to look into this the depths of those cluster charts are endlessly interesting and if you work for a media company and want to understand how your media brand is positioned in the blogosphere left right and center there's a lot of findings that will presented during the development phase are very interesting but anyway these three papers are the first round of research that we've offered and Lucas has been a real leader in in organizing it and conceiving of it and I guess the question I wanted to ask you is as a mapper of this movement and someone who has chronicled it since before it acquired this visibility what do you see in this election cycle and particularly the super PAC cycle that strikes you as new or emerging about about fact-checking I guess that uh I mean I'm really interested in my dissertation about fact-checking as a kind of reform movement within journalism which as Steve so rightly pointed out is uh is sort of one of the uh you know most interesting and substantial movements born of journalism recently that that tries in a very self-conscious way to deal with sort of changes in the information environment and with you know with something that's always been a challenge to the conduct of objective journalism which is how do you uh grapple with misinformation and still maintain your stance as an objective reporter and what's so fascinating about what a fact in fact-check.org is that they you know they vary much you to the idea that they're that they are journalists they are objective and yet they're going to depart from this practice that uh that is so often characterized you know a lead journalism uh of not weighing in on whether something's true or false and I think the challenges that they've faced in doing that are some indication of why journalists have traditionally been so reluctant to to take these questions head-on right it's not something you can do in 30 minutes well on deadline it's not something you can do 30 minutes on deadline and it's also something that invariably provokes you know a fair degree of dissatisfaction out among your readers end out in the world of the politicians that you cover and you know the danger is that even though you're hewing to the truth you end up being perceived as a political actor and you know and it's easy to say if you were to say for instance well you know in that debate you know a democrat is clearly lying you know more egregiously than the republicans or two presidential candidates then some people are going to take that at face value but many other people are going to assume that you're biased and they're going to say well you know how could you accuse the democrat of lying you know clearly his policies are better and it's very difficult for people as I think Jason and Brendan's research shows to depart from their own political convictions when they analyze this kind of information and so journalists have adapted to that you know over the decades and now it's you know it's normal and objective journalism to steer through these questions we see you're very you're very objective about the limits of objectivity which is that's right but you presented in your opening remarks the example of the ombudsman's column where he seemed to maybe walk past an opportunity to accept that in an ideal world there would be more of this embedded in every column of the newspaper but what do you think knowing and hearing from journalists about the reality of deadline political reporting where you're out of speech you've got a file 45 minutes after the speech is over or sooner you have no easy way to confidently call a judgment about a claim about an obscure public policy matter in a speech so what do you think ought to be best practices in the newspaper columns as you read and the cable television news reports that you that you absorb or even in routine the real question is whether in just a straight reporting article you know like that article written by Jeff Selony about about the speech by by Hailey Barber you know should it be acceptable for a journalist to say well the governor said this and in fact that's not true or that's a lie or that's an exaggeration I mean there are different ways to phrase it and I think that you know we can all agree and most journalists who I talk to agree that that's an admirable ideal and I think it's something that we're seeing actually merge in terms of you're seeing more of these routine fact checks being incorporated into straight reporting sometimes by citing dedicated fact checkers like put a fact in fact check.org which is what's what's so interesting about their work but you know they have to be very cautious in undertaking this for one thing because if they do it too hastily then they will invariably you know walk into minefields all the fact checkers have ended up you know having to tweak the rulings at some points when they rule too hastily on something and they're they're doing this full time so it's a human endeavor and it's difficult and also because there's a risk that even if they get it right they'll alienate their audiences and they will alienate their political constituencies and that I think is the real danger that it has to be sort of managed in a careful way as as journalists start to do this. Jason do you have anything to add about that danger is it is it offensive to audiences to have that explicit of a ruling as opposed to the more traditional journalism format of simply recording what someone said accurately at an event do you have an instinct about that or data? We don't have data on that specific question. My instinct would be that yes people don't like being told that they're wrong but my other instinct is that's probably not so bad because if you're in this sort of standard world of you know of he said she said and somewhere else in the same story or same newspaper there's an article of the somewhere where the opponent's claims are being accepted uncritically that that's just as offensive or just as aggravating so I would be less that there are reasons why embedded fact-checking may be problematic in fact one of the one of the hopes that that Brent and I have is that we'll over time be able to develop a nice toolkit that will allow people to make fact-checking more effective and if we're lucky Bill will work with us on that. I won't actually make you answer put you on the spot. But in terms of actually having it embedded in in the stories I don't fear the alienation perhaps quite as much as Lucas but he's more of an expert on journalism markets than I am. Well it by the way my former Washington Post colleague Michael Dobbs just snuck into the back so during the you know the front during the reception that follows you can chat I hope with all these folks but Michael's paper about the history and the rise of fact-checking is one of the papers we've already released in addition to the two that we're releasing this week and we had a very interesting argument when we were meeting about the subject not in public earlier about whether the origins of fact-checking go all the way back to IF Stone or not or where you where you date the beginning of this kind of self-consciousness about fact-checking but anyway this this last discussion does lead us back and this will be my last question we'll take a few from the audience and then we'll let you talk to each other and and have and join join a reception this lie of the year business because the transition in my mind from the discussion we were just having is is it really so bad to have contestation over what is true that is can't we all just belly up to the bar and fight about whether or not an assertion is true or false and isn't it the nature of truth not to use the in the capital T sense too grandiose but isn't it in the nature to argue about it to search for it to to refine arguments until you feel satisfied that you've come close to it obviously you know particle physics is objectively unshakable true or false but quite a lot of the other things we debate about are not especially in politics so I use that as the introduction to what was the nature of the argument about your lie of the year sure and and what was your defense what was the criticism what was your defense well I'll let probably let Wendell make the criticism because he was he was one of the people who was critical about it but I'll I guess I'll explain first of all what we're talking about the when we say the lie of the year so political fact as I think most of you know rates statements on a truth a meter and each statement in our database is rated from true to pants on fire and part of the what is unique about political fact and different than fact check dot org which was our inspiration is that we wanted to provide different new media ways of presenting information to help you as a as a voter as a member of in our democracy of knowing how things are in the past fact checking was a series of long articles that that unless you had read them all you wouldn't know well does so and so get a lot of things wrong or what sorts of things to so and so get wrong or whatever so the way we made political fact was by doing ratings on our truth a meter and then compiling those ratings on a person's report card once a year in a in a year end package we name what we consider to be the most significant falsehood of the year and we call it the lie of the year and we have done that three times and the first all three have involved health care the first one was Sarah Palin's claim that the democratic health care law contained death panels the second one was the claim by many republicans that the democratic health care law was a government takeover of health care and then for 2011 it was the claim by many democrats that the ryan budget would end medicare and we were not the only fact checker to name this as as one of the most significant falsehoods fact check.org did also naming it one of its whoppers of the year and glenn kesler who writes the post fact check column also named it as one of the most significant falsehoods of the year we though took the lion share of the criticism from many liberals who thought that it was a reasonable description of what the ryan budget would do for medicare and this set off a tremendous even beginning when we named our finalists we got tremendous opposition about it and our reasoning the same as the reasoning for the washington post and for fact check.org was as stated at least in the times that we rated it it was not accurate that the ryan budget didn't end medicare that it did indeed as we acknowledged in the article drastically changed medicare but it didn't affect medicare for people who were 55 and older and it was very much a claim as we know that was targeted at senior citizens to scare them and this was part of a tactic that has worked very well for the democrats by scaring senior citizens about medicare and if you look back at the history of campaign advertising you can go even into the 1950s when the first tactics were used to scare senior citizens in that case it was about social security with images and campaign ads of of social security cards being torn up so we we published that we we decided as did fact check.org in the post that it was a very significant falsehood and and the significance that you attributed to it was primarily because because of the implication that current medicare beneficiaries of the current system would in fact not be affected by the voucher changes yes that was that was the primary part and the and the secondary part was that indeed there was a program that under the ryan budget now this was before his his new plan with ron wyden which retains conventional medicare that it would also retain a medicare-like program into the future now this is where wendell objected that in the view of wendell and many other readers who wrote to us hundreds i mean i i don't know i remember the count but it was well over a thousand emails that we got and hardly any were positive about our decision in in their view it was making such a drastic change to medicare that it was it was a true statement and in fact think progress had a headline that got repeated many times that said political facts lie the year is actually true and so so anyway we we start up a fuss with that and and i think lucas touched on something that the the nature of this kind of journalism is you put yourself out there this is a gutsy form of journalism and by making these calls whether it's an individual fact check or a kind of year-end conclusion like that you're gonna you're gonna face a lot of criticism just as we have lately with some other ratings and and that as lucas pointed out and a friend said to me yesterday that's why not many people get into this business because we're in the business where in a single day with two ratings we can alienate both halves of our audience you know and what what kind of a business model is that you know so do you think substantively in terms of you obviously you have a thick skin for this work or if you develop it do you now feel that much more confident about what medicare reform actually amounts to and doesn't amount to then you did before you got into this fight i mean if you have you learned something more about the truth as a result of arguing your position no i mean i think we had reported this very thoroughly before we made the call and you know it's important to recognize this was based on 11 fact checks that we had done over the course of the year so i don't i don't feel we needed to learn anything more about it the lie of the year is a award for the most significant falsehood and so we know at that point we had already determined it was false we just had to determine how did it stack up compared to the other falsehoods of the year and there weren't in our view others that came close to this one right so wendell do you want to add to the or give direct voice to the criticism that he attributed to you yeah maybe he soft-pedaled your right and i really didn't want to be a critic because i so admire what the fact any of the fact checkers do but i felt strongly that this was uh was not a lie because the the the ryan plan uh would in my view not just in my view but it would uh fundamentally change the medicare program certainly not right away not immediately but over time it would and when you are moving to a about your support system or a premium support system uh and the incentives that would be in place to essentially ultimately privatize the program and change other elements of it uh it is in essence uh doing away with the medicare program as we know it eventually it would take time to do it but it would it would indeed do that that was my point of view that if you are and i began my piece was saying if you if you have a uh a car that you were marketing as a ford for example and you change the the engine of the transmission and you try to market it as a ford uh it's not a ford anymore it's something else uh and uh while you might be able to call medicare medicare under these changes it would be a fundamentally altered program to the point that i didn't think it was dishonest to say that it was would be ending medicare uh not immediately there's there's no doubt that that's true it would not immediately affect current seniors or those uh getting all that close to uh being medicare eligible but for for others uh who would be coming into the program in later years they would be they would be finding a program that is quite different from what seniors for the last what 40 more or more years have known it to be great thank you so let's take a couple questions and then we'll let you uh let me this this gentleman was up first with the and don't do if you can identify yourself and remember there's a live audience my name is mark nadell um i wanted to follow up on two things that wendell mentioned one was you said when you were a reporter on weekends you'd be able to write news analysis where you could put the news in context and i assume you could express your opinion but during the week it sounded like then you didn't put the news in context and my understanding is a journalist my definition of journalist is someone who reports the news in a way in but putting in context to help people understand it that's one um second is i was disturbed when you said that so many people reporters don't understand the healthcare industry the insurance industry it's such an important policy area i'm wondering are there veterans like yourself retirees whatever who could be available to give a course at the neiman center or some other foundation that journalists who are going to be reporting on this and affecting you know the policies we vote on um can be more informed and thereby inform us better on what's happening um is there any work on this uh i when i was a reporter i i i did as i was writing tried to provide context as i could as i had the time to do it a lot of the stories that i wrote i actually had to phone in to dictate the stories and use and you know a lot of journalism is done on very short deadlines and often you don't have the luxury of time to to be able to provide the context and often you don't have the space to uh to to fully explain a story or just don't have the the mental ability at the moment when you're running to such deadline to do as as thorough a job providing the context as i think you'd like to do so i think there are those constraints that that sometimes work against a reporter providing adequate context for every context for every story he or she writes uh having more time to write a column for sarah and sunday though for the papers that carried my column uh gave me a bit more chance to to to think about the story that i was writing or the commentary that i was writing banalas pieces piece that i was writing so it part of it is just the way journalism has to be in terms of meeting deadlines and being first with a story if you possibly can if that if that is important in your news organization and certainly with online journalism i think that's become even more of an imperative to try to be the first to do a story when i was in the industry in the insurance industry and was dealing with reporters it was uh very important for the wire services to be the first to report sygna's earnings uh to you know to the to the business world but they had a formula for doing yet it was nothing there was little context they they were look they were looking for certain things that they could just plug into a story and and it was just kind of a race to see who could actually get that story out but there was very little analysis of of what was really going on with the companies earnings here to your second question i i would there are not i don't think many people who who have left the business world uh who had an earlier journalistic career to to provide i would love to do that to tell you the truth i've thought about doing that i just haven't taken the time to explore doing that but i would one of the things i am doing now is can returning to my i am now an analyst at the center for public integrity and i write commentaries once a week for for for the center for public integrity my columns are picked up elsewhere they appear in the the huffington post but i i would like to uh to do it to do exactly what you were suggesting right there's someone here in front my name is kemi but i'm with the pakistani spectator i was just wondering that if you have done any analysis about tea party and wall street occupied group there are impressions that somehow all wall street occupied are drugies homeless jobless and all tea party people's are kind of racist or anti muslim uh you could draw a parallel you know if you go to rnc in a receptionist area you always have black faces like at the heritage foundation but once you go beyond that its business is run by you know very white nice like you guys uh you know so whereas if you go to dnc you would see real america and bill clinton's word right uh michael steve did make rnc real america but you know now it's the same thing so i was just wondering that if you have any fact checking about wall street occupied you looked at what's the tea party uh dudes thanks uh there's a chain email that's been circulating that makes some claims about this that is um uh preposterous uh i'm sure but difficult to to validate uh and what it says and it's written uh clearly by supporters of the tea party that uh number of rapes murders you know various things that occurred at tea party rallies compared to occupy rallies and as uh as somebody who covered cops night cops in tampa and some other places and working with police departments you know how hard it is to collect data like that and so i'm sure the data i guess as a fact checker i should say the data is very suspicious but we haven't we're not able to verify it because i don't know you know how do you define an occupy rally in terms of time and location and the the amount of research you'd have to do for those would be um it'd be a tremendous amount of research to try to do that so that that whole concept is circulated from the tea party perspective um in a chain email and this is one of our challenges is as fact checkers trying to um have we have uh three uh full-time writers in fact i should recognize martha hamilton who's our deputy editor is there and becky bowers who's one of our writers uh for political national and we try every day to try to put new content on the site but if we were to tackle something like that you're looking at a project that would take days weeks if it was even possible to do great this gentleman and then we'd take a couple more and um and let you talk informally hi my name is barry jones uh i guess i'm with wpf w because uh i want to ask about uh corporate sponsored media and truth telling versus uh listeners supported or viewers supported uh media and uh specifically i guess i want to ask about democracy now since i've kind of cut off the network news so i guess i guess i've you put npr up there on your screen did you do you see anything about the effectiveness of nonprofit versus um for-profit media in here attaining credibility at least uh in the ways that you've mapped it lucas it's difficult to say uh conclusively whether they're whether nonprofit media is more effective or less effective than commercial media but it is there are a few interesting things to say one is that you know npr uh and other I think other public outlets have had entered into partnerships with different fact checkers so I think what effect has a message machine partnership or did with npr uh you know so they're avid consumers of of this new journalistic resource uh you know you're mentioned of democracy now I think is interesting because traditionally one of the first places where you saw something that looked like fact check journalism was within the partisan press and this you know this was steve reference and steve's reference to i f stone previously I mean he did pieces that sometimes looked a little bit like fact checks I mean he would take a political statement and say you know whether it was true or false usually false uh so it's a kind of journalism that has that has rested more comfortably uh more easily in alternative media in progressive media or or conservative media but you know in media that openly has a political viewpoint uh and I think you see that in uh in democracy now so they do you know they do segments that seem a little bit like fact checking and that they will openly contradict political claims that's exactly what makes the project of political fact and fact check that are so interesting that you know they want to take those claims head on also but outside of an openly political context right so they want to bring that back into the fold of objective journalism yes there's a woman there in the front did you have a question? I'm just wondering uh if you've seen any effect from having this fact checking things first of all I'd like to thank you for forum and also for providing that sort of service as a writer that's very useful um you said that you had a like a report card is this of naming and shaming I mean there has to be some sort of line where people know they're being watched and they just can't lie anymore are you seeing any effect from from that in terms of of of the sort of the stretching of the truth and the number of outright lies out there? Well I don't were journalists not social scientists so I couldn't say there's less line going on this year than there was in you know last year and it being a campaign year and a post-citizens united year it's going to be a whole different playing field. I do have have seen a fair number of examples where an elected official or a talk show host will after we give them a false on the truth of meter they will say yeah I got that wrong I'm sorry and we've heard anecdotally things like Sherrod Brown a senator from Ohio telling his staff I don't want to get any falses from PolitiFact and that you know he he cares about his record we we know of several examples involving President Obama where we've given him a false or something and the next time he'll get something right so what was a stock line that we say isn't true he'll stop repeating however there are times like we had one the other day where we had called him out on a claim that preventive care saves money and generally now there are areas in health care where preventive care can save money but generally the folks at GAO and and and a survey of research by the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that overall preventive care doesn't necessarily save money and so we gave Obama a false and he repeated that claim the other day which surprised us so but then you have to like Bill O'Reilly I think we had an example where we gave him a false he apologized for it Keith Oberman same situation so so there are interesting insights like that I I guess and this is sort of the difference between Jason's approach and my approach I'm a journalist I am my goal is not to get politicians to stop lying I am a journalist and my goal is to empower democracy and then you democracy can decide what you want to do with the information I provide and you may decide that you agree with it and and that you're gonna hold this elected official accountable in ways and not vote for him or her or whatever or you may decide in some cases you disagree may you might disagree about lie of the year you may disagree about any particular ruling we make but my goal isn't to get politicians to stop lying my goal is to give you the information you need to be a better citizen and I think that's the role of the journalist and when we get into this role of well we want them to stop lying I think we sort of get out of the bounds of what is a journalist now I'm I'm interested in Jason I've talked some and about you know the kinds of things that fact checkers can do that might persuade people and I guess our goal is we don't want people to continue having misconceptions about things but again I'm not a propagandist I am a journalist so last question there and then I'm gonna call time and let you guys ask your questions informally which I'm sure the panelists will be happy to take thank you gentlemen my name is Laura like Kelly I actually have a question for Jason I'm one of these people who would love for our politicians to stop lying having worked on Capitol Hill in 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war my question I I'm from a background in social psychology and I remember talking to my mentor about the 2004 election and I asked him how could these sort of extremist and peripheral arguments hold so much weight and he said Lorelai the American public it's an interesting cultural phenomenon Americans will tolerate extremism if it's come by honestly if it's honest extremism and that was the case with George Bush I don't know if you agree with that or not but I think some things that you mentioned earlier about the social psychology aspects of how you come at this problem I think are really hopeful and maybe you could talk about them a little bit yeah I can try it sort of an open-ended question of course the extent to which somebody is viewed as extreme depends on you know what one's own personal beliefs are so if somebody shares the same beliefs of any given candidate they're unlikely to see that person as extreme and there's a robust debate in political science the extent to which the American public is polarized and whether people are further apart ideologically that's certainly one aspect of what's going on if I happen to be really far to the right or to the left other people that I talk to about politics that share those beliefs are unlikely to we're unlikely to see each other as extreme I'm not sure that exactly answers your question there's something else going on and I'm a little bit hesitant to bring this up but there are some people in social psychology who say that conservatives are fundamentally different in how they view the world and that conservatives are far more dogmatic and that the type of motivated reasoning that Brent and I have seen in our studies is more prevalent in conservatives I'm not prepared to go that far yet in large part because we haven't seen things work for liberals the backfire effect that we've seen seems to be happening with conservatives but one of the things that we don't have a tremendously good handle on is what are all the contextual factors that make corrections not only ineffective but under what conditions will they produce this backfire I think this is sort of you know the the flip side to some of what Bill was saying is you know he's a journalist and you know journalists have time pressures and they need they need to be staying with what's in the news right now and social scientists like myself we do things much more slowly and certainly I think more slowly than I wish we could produce our research more quickly if it's anybody really really wealthy and wants to give us money to do it so we can make it have a more camera there and on that yes if you have lots of money yes we're accepting you've all been very patient let's give the panelists a round of applause we welcome you to stay and continue the conversation informally thank you