Why Fact Checking Won’t Save Democracy

We need a thoughtfully multipartisan media

How worried should we be about climate driven sea level rise? Is Donald Trump really a fascist? How dangerous is the Fukushima-irradiated water being released by Japan into the ocean? In our personal and political lives we face a number of serious and urgent questions. A segment of journalists increasingly see it as their job cut through the tangled mess of claims and studies to deliver factual (and sometimes even moral) clarity. Can they actually do so? Should they?

In a recent article in The New Atlantis, M. Anthony Mills traces the historical shift of fact-checking, its move away from something that happened internally between newspaper staff into a tool used to try to shape public discourse. A hundred or so years ago, newspapers were largely untrustworthy. The average issue was full of mistruths, specious claims, and outright bullshit. It was only over the course of the 20^th century that professionalization turned the industry into a more reliably positive influence on a democratic society. Journalists fact-checked their articles to ensure accuracy, to help the public believe that they could believe the outlet’s reporting.

That internal focus eventually gave way to the idea that journalists had a sufficient handle on fact checking to hold others to account. Initially this meant politicians. Journalists could challenge officeholders’ claims, in some ways representing public skepticism. Yet, it poses a new challenge. Can journalists hold politicians to account in a fair way? Are they able to do so regardless of party affiliation?

After the 2000s, a further shift occurred. “Debunking” articles became more popular, pieces in which journalists didn’t just fact check official statements but beliefs that circulated among ordinary citizens. The job of the press, so understood, was no longer accurate reporting but actively battling conspiracy theories, dubious factual claims, and other disputed speech. Journalists weren’t supposed to just convey ideas but also to police them.

This was necessary to secure a stable democracy. At least that was the theory. Without a “shared reality” or common set of facts, democratic politics was ostensibly impossible. Yet that theory hasn’t seemed to have panned out. Years of diligent fact checking has seemed to have resulted in only lower levels of trust in the press and in politicians. What’s gone wrong here?

What Can Journalists Know?

For me, the limits of fact checking became apparent during the pandemic. In a piece that I wrote for The Conversation, I noted how tentative studies were, in light of the urgency of the problem, getting transformed into seeming authoritative facts. Much was in dispute. How deadly was the virus really? Did masks help? Where did the virus come from, a Chinese market or a nearby laboratory? But many journalists didn’t cover the dispute. Instead they believed they could determine which science was right.

As someone who was concerned very early on with the potential for the pandemic to only widen the gulfs between Americans, one issue stuck out to me in particular: so-called natural immunity. Outlets like USA Today “fact-checked” whether a coronavirus infection should count the same as getting a vaccine, typically deciding that the answer was unequivocally “no.” But they would often do this in light of a few, or sometimes even only one, scientific study. Yet other researchers at the time disagreed, albeit using different methods and data sources.

Such “fact checks” are only superficially about scientific facts. Really their purpose is to police the bounds of acceptable public beliefs about the pandemic. In theory that might sound fine, but it practice they often amounted to “noble lies.” At this point in time, there were considerable worries about getting people to voluntarily get vaccinated. Even though the science on COVID-19 immunity was in its infancy, there was pressure to exaggerate the case for the shot. In this context, honestly covering the uncertainty probably felt like giving ammunition to anti-vaxxers. In short, journalists acted as if they believed the public couldn’t be trusted with the full picture. In short, it was better to lie about scientific certainty, because the goal of increasing vaccination rates was noble.

Why these fact-checks did more to cement confidence among the already convinced rather than to persuade skeptics is easy to see. They simply weren’t trustworthy. One doesn’t have to be scientist to track down articles with dissenting scientific opinions or find countries taking a different approach. For instance, natural immunity was not at all controversial in most of Europe. While most people don’t know enough biology to evaluate the validity of the cited studies, they’re expert enough at reading people and situations to recognize that someone was trying to manipulate them, that a political decision was being laundered into a scientific question.

Transforming fact-checking from a tool that journalists used to demonstrate their public integrity into a strategy to shape citizens’ opinions has undone decades of work put into building the press into a trustworthy social institution. Not only do journalists lack the expertise to authoritatively evaluate complex and counterintuitive scientific claims, there are real concerns about their ability to do so fairly for politically contentious issues. They risk using their privileges to advance their own political goals.

Just the Facts, Ma’am?

What I find most troublesome is the underlying idea that factual consensus is so fundamental to democratic politics. To begin, I can’t find a time period in history in which that factual consensus actually existed. Even the mid-20^th century, the time period that many people depict as a golden era of pre-post-truth politics, was rife with disagreements, untruths, and conspiracy theories regarding communism, the Vietnam war, women’s right, race politics, nuclear power, DDT, etc. The idea that our time is uniquely post-truth may itself be a post-truthy claim.

As I described in my second book, what does seem to be unique about our time period is our preoccupation with certainty, especially over facts. We very much want the facts to undergird our politics (and not those of our opponents). And that pushes us to no longer talk about what actually matters to us.

In a previous post, I pointed out how this often plays out in environmental politics. Enviros that promote the ideal of a “post-growth” society, one involving far less work and consumption (and admittedly a lower material standard of living) didn’t arrive at their conclusions by soberly reading IPCC reports. First off, other people read those same reports but instead advocate a high energy, “ecomodernist” approach to the problem. Second, it is easy to believe cataclysmic interpretations of climate science when doing so seems to legitimate one’s own vision of the good life and the good society. It is hard to be skeptical of scientific claims that appear to justify the world that a person already wants.

And the flipside is also true. People are often intensely skeptical and disbelieving of studies that seem to threaten things they cherish. I’m not subscribing to the idea of “cognitive dissonance” (a theory that itself might be bunk). Rather, it’s a completely logical reaction. If a set of facts may justify policy that undermines the things that I love, then I damn well want them to be as certain as possible and for the people promoting those facts to prove their integrity.

No doubt that this attitude sometimes manifests in claims that more neutral observers would find outrageous. So high was the level of suspicion surrounding nuclear technology in the 1990s that people could believe that a national laboratory was purposefully poisoning nearby residents. The mistrust in the public health establishment during the pandemic was such that far out stories about microchips in vaccine syringes and other otherwise fringe beliefs could gain traction. “Fact checking” articles that dutifully took apart these claims obtusely overlooked how these stories actually conveyed vitally important political facts about public mistrust in government officials and scientists.

Unfortunately, I don’t think enough people learned any lessons from the pandemic or other controversies. I was heartened to see someone take California Gavin Newsom to task for pretending like is decision to help restaurants quickly reopen and restart the film industry, while leaving playgrounds shuttered and preventing people from visiting dying relatives in the hospital, was scientifically ordained rather than politically determined. But will that much needed critical attitude toward scientistic talk be carried forward to the next crisis?

Rebuilding a Press that is Worthy of Trust

I’m not an expert on the media. I probably know just enough to get myself into trouble. Yet, as someone who studies scientific controversies, I think many of the traditional truisms of journalism has led the field astray. As an unintended consequence of the earlier emphasis on fact-checking, many journalists ended up with a simplistic notion of objectivity. While institutions or whole scientific fields, as a collective, are sometimes capable to approximating objectivity, it is largely beyond the capacity of individual human beings.

There is no doubt that the earlier emphasis on objectivity sowed public trust in the press. But objectivity was, I think, not the main driver. Professionalization also aided the perception that journalists handled the issues fairly and had benevolent intentions. That image of journalism is increasingly and increasingly obviously at odds with today’s practice of click-chasing headlines, picking political sides, and not being upfront with what many readers view as obvious partisanship.

But what are we to do about this? How might journalism command the respect that it once did? I’m not about to trot out well-worn arguments about the “fairness doctrine,” the rule that forced news outlets to present polar opposite opinions on political issues. That kind of debate-centric presentation of public problems won’t help us navigate polarized societies, if it ever was actually helpful. What citizens need most is for journalists to help them understand disagreement and for them to model democratic interactions.

I would reverse the standard truism about democracy and facts. Rather than see facts as pre-political basis for democratic interactions, I think that the capacity to disagree democratically is what sets up the foundation for a reasonable and productive collective handling of facts. Without a fundamental level of democratic trust, we are, in the words of Ari Schulman, “unable to hear in others’ invocations of science anything other than smug attempts to gain power over us”

Democratic societies are like giant arranged marriages. We didn’t decide to be together, but somehow we have to make it work. We’re stuck with other people who believe things that we think are outrageous. So, most of all we need to charitably understand the reasons for their beliefs, to be able to recognize the small ways in which we might be persuasive. But, most of, we need to be capable of seeing possibilities for making important decisions despite the fact that consensus will never arrive.

There are some journalistic outlets that approximate what I’d call “thoughtful multipartisan reporting.” Undark, for instance, helpfully covered the scientific debate over the origins COVID, highlighting how different methods and disciplinary outlooks resulted in varied interpretations of the limited amount of evidence available. But we also need outlets that try to take different political sides seriously and explain how conservatives think to liberals, and vice-verse. Tangle is an example of a Substack that is exploring how best to do that.

Whether the private journalistic market will fill this need sufficiently to make a dent on the sad state of American public discourse is not at all clear. It might be a utopian vision, but I could see public media stepping into the role of helping to mediate and clarify public disagreements. What would NPR look like if its managers saw their role as not catering to their unrepresentative niche of listeners/donators? What if their focus was to maximize the trustworthiness of their reporting among the broadest swath of Americans as is feasibly possible? To reach a state where nearly everyone would feel that they and their communities’ viewpoints and concerns were treated fairly in reporting and analysis?

That’s a far cry from that journalism that dominates the airwaves today, but a vision that I think is worth defending.