Four of Five Red Pencils to The Times on Fact-Checking the Debate

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

With its battalion of fact-checking reporters at the ready, The Times did battle Wednesday night against lies, damn lies, statistics, misstatements and subtle truth stretching during the presidential debate in Denver.

So did competing forces around the country at other major newspapers and organizations like Politifact.com and FactCheck.org.

On Thursday morning, I put out the call to some professional observers and some regular readers, and talked to a few people inside The Times as well to get a read on how well it went. The effort was the paper's most extensive fact-checking effort, as Richard L. Berke, an assistant managing editor, told me this week.

Here is a sampling of what I heard â€" and eventually, my own thoughts. Although The Times, with its usual elegance, does not often stoop to gimmicky metrics like stars for movie reviews, letter grades for football coaches, or needle-to-the-wall applause meter s for lies and truth, I have less self-restraint. I'm giving the effort four red pencils of a possible five, and will elaborate later.

Onto the opinions and observations of others:

From Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University:

It's good to see The Times try to sort out truth and lies, but it would be great to see The Times a) call falsehoods and lies what they are instead of using euphemisms; and b) put the fact-checking into the main story, the one that most people will read, rather than turning it into a less-viewed sideshow.

From Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College:

I'm heartened by seeing less punch-pulling on stating that factual claims are wrong. There is no hedging when Jackie Calmes writes, “That is not true.”

One concern about the fact-checking movement is that it could lead to ghettoization of verification in political journalism. I worry about that. The main piece was about style, horse race and conflict. Those stories are the ones that drive the conversation, get on the front page and that people read.

Here is Mr. Nyhan's overall take on the debate.

From Michael Cooper, a political reporter at The Times:

I hope readers found it useful to get some real-time evaluation of what the candidates were saying as the debate unfolded - checking some of their assertions, or simply providing context to illuminate complex issues without self-serving spin. It was especially great to be able to draw on the expertise of our beat reporters - Annie Lowrey on the economy, Robert Pear and Abby Goodnough on health care, Jackie Calmes on fiscal policy, John Broder on energy, to name just a few. Personally, I thought many of the most effective posts were the work of our Graphics department: the graphics showing how much the debt has grown, or how many jobs have been added back, told those stories more effectively than words.

The clock, of course, was the enemy. We added items to our debate dashboard in real time, all the while preparing for a print deadline that fell all-too-soon after the debate ended. Overnight we drilled down and took an expanded look at the candidates' differences on health care, which went up on the site on Thursday morning, and our producers made what I think just may be the most useful thing on our entire Web site: the interactive tool that allows people to watch the debate, read the transcript and see our analysis and checkpoint pieces scroll along in one place.

Now, with the luxury of more time, I hope we will be able to write in greater depth about a whole host of things that came up in the heat of the moment on Wednesday night that we need to explore in more detail.

From some Times readers, some who are experts in their own right, responding to my Twitte r query:

@DJBentley: @Sulliview Accurate and explained clearly. But the language used e.g. “misleading statements” and “falsely stated,” is lie too strong?

‏@pessimism: @Sulliview I really don't like the way “fact-checking” is used everywhere as something separate from what should be expected in journalism.

‏@capnjoy: @Sulliview great. Clear, with lots of context, and driven by facts, not need to appear perfectly balanced at any cost.

@stevekass: @Sulliview No one's “fact-checking” was any good. Mitt lied blatantly, Obama didn't. Moving business overseas, pre-existing conditions…

@froomkin: @sulliview Pretty good NYT fact-checking story on A20. But no skepticism of Romney's fantastical claims on A1

So why do I give the effort four red pencils out of five? The Times was prepared, fast and as far as I can tell accurate in its fact-checking, both on the Web and in print. As noted by others above, though, it's disappointi ng that not even a whiff of the fact-checking is integrated into main article or front-page coverage.

And CNN forfeits all its red pencils for the night for one fact-checking blooper concerning a $5 trillion tax cut for high-income earners, as pointed out by Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall.