USA Today:
"Duty:" One of those claims that give me hemorrhoids. But, reading it carefully and thinking about it, if it is not the duty of journalists to fact-check then they're just tape recorders: whatever a pol says is reprinted verbatim. They can't do that, they have to fact-check to some extent. Is there a third way? Not cover him/her. The Huffington Post covered Trump as a candidate initially but very quickly made an editorial decision to relegate its coverage of him to the entertainment section. Then it went back to covering him as a candidate. "Get it first" quickly gets conjoined to Gresham's Law and just like that a liar-politician gets $2 billion worth of free media coverage.
But it's not a matter of one and done.
When politicians brazenly repeat untruths and fabrications, they need to be called out each time. It's not enough to refute a statement once.
Anybody got any Preparation H?
Now here starts something I think is very important:
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and PolitiFact, an initiative of the Tampa Bay Times,along with Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post.
The media does fact-check has fact-checked Trump.
"In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.
"He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong."
In awarding Trump its coveted Lie of the Year award for 2015, PolitiFact couldn't settle on one of Trump's truth-challenged proclamations. The award went for his body of work. "Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy he has followed for years," PolitiFact said.
It added, "PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked.
…
The Washington Post's Kessler has an assessment similar to those of his fellow fact-checkers. He wrote: "Trump makes Four-Pinocchio statements over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false.
And here are the money shots:
Sometimes, confronted with their errors and prevarications, pols will back off. But not always. And Trump not so much.
...
He appears to care little about the facts; his staff does not even bother to respond to fact-checking inquiries."
To quote Olivia Nuzzi, "They don't care!" Trumpists do not care. “Anything that Donald Trump talks about, that’s what I’m about.” They are not into facts so they are not into lies. And since Trumpists don't care, Trump and his campaign don't care. There is post-literal communication going on between Trump and his supporters that fact-checking cannot gate-keep.
And, there is something else: Trumpists, right-wingers, Republicans in general, don't believe the media! If they hear USA Today or PolitiFact or FactCheck say Trump lied they won't believe it. They'll believe Trump. "If they hear": Trumpists have not even heard of PolitiFact or FactCheck.
Truth is vulnerable in a democracy. There is a dangerous synergy between Trump and his supporters. It is a danger to democracy. Truth has never been so abused in American politics. The media must fact-check but media fact-checking is not going to protect democracy in America or truth in American politics. Trumpism, and this is a component of Trumpism, must be crushed. If anybody knew for sure how to do that it would have been done already. And Hitler would have been stopped in 1933.
