Truth on the brink: Fact-checking faces pressure in the AI and Trump era

One problem is that fact-checking is often viewed through a political lens. Republicans tend to like pieces that tear down claims made by Democrats, and vice versa. With Republicans currently in control of Washington, that obviously leads to more fact checks of folks like Trump, which his supporters view and weaponize by attacking media organizations as biased.”

Rob Tornoe, digital editor and writer, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Facing slop created by so-called artificial intelligence and a decentralized news environment being made worse every day by large tech companies, it’s becoming harder for journalists to point people to the truth. 

Add to that President Donald Trump’s relentless firehose of false information and his administration’s loose relationship with the truth, and it almost becomes an impossible task for any news organization to deploy the resources necessary to help its readers navigate the rough and garbage-filled waters. 

“I see a community under intense pressure,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, wrote back in June. “Not everyone loves fact-checking, and there are powerful political forces that would simply like it to go away.”

Glenn Kessler’s departure from The Washington Post after nearly three decades seems as symbolic of this decline as anything. The Post’s resident fact checker since 2011, Kessler was part of a recent mass exodus of talent from the newspaper following Trump-friendly changes instituted by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. It’s unclear if The Post will replace Kessler and keep the Pinocchios flowing, despite their popularity with readers. 

“I had not considered leaving at all until the buyout,” Kessler said in a phone interview. “The voluntary buyout was offered, and I realized it was financially stupid of me not to take it.” 

Like just about everyone else, Kessler is now on Substack, a move he hadn’t planned on making until the platform’s owners reached out following his departure from The Post. (Kessler said he left the paper to work on books and was “in the midst of completing a novel.”) In less than a month, he’s already amassed almost 3,000 subscribers and has continued to do the types of detailed examinations he once wrote for The Post, albeit to a much smaller audience. 

It’s an audience made smaller by social media platforms allowing misinformation (which actor Stephen Fry accurately described as “a polite little word for something so utterly corrosive”) to flow freely on their platforms, mainly out of political deference to Trump. Earlier this year, Meta (the parent company of Facebook) ended its third-party fact-checking in favor of community notes, while X has been actively throttling posts with links to prevent users from leaving a platform increasingly overrun with garbage. 

“In other countries, like in the European Union, there are laws in place that require [social media companies] to pay more attention to misinformation,” Kessler said. “But the guardrails are off in the United States.” 

One problem is that fact-checking is often viewed through a political lens. Republicans tend to like pieces that tear down claims made by Democrats, and vice versa. With Republicans currently in control of Washington, that obviously leads to more fact checks of folks like Trump, which his supporters view and weaponize by attacking media organizations as biased. That creates a strong disincentive for media organizations, especially those owned by large corporations that have business before the current administration, to push back hard and often against claims made by Trump. 

How else can you explain the parent company of CBS agreeing to pay $16 million to Trump to settle what most experts viewed as a baseless lawsuit over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview? The same goes for ABC, which paid $15 million to settle a separate Trump lawsuit over comments made by longtime anchor George Stephanopoulos. 

“It was about fealty,” veteran CNN anchor Jake Tapper said at Variety and Rolling Stone’s “Truth Seekers Summit” in New York last month. “There is now a thirst among some to sue media organizations not for the purpose of justice or correcting the record but to bankrupt media organizations… But I don’t think that that should change our allegiance to facts and the truth and making sure we talk to the other side of the story and all that.”

While outlets like PolitiFact, Poynter, The New York Times and CNN still regularly perform fact checks on Trump and his administration, Kessler said there’s an opportunity for local news outlets to perform a similar function — focused on their own elected leaders. The main barrier is a lack of resources due to issues we’re all familiar with at this point, which have created news deserts across the country and hollowed out most of the surviving newsrooms. 

“I joke with people that today is the best time to be a corrupt politician,” Kessler said. “No one will be watching what you do.” 

One glaring example is former U.S. Representative George Santos of New York, who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Santos, who ran as a Republican in Long Island, was elected based on a fabricated resume that included claims of graduating from New York University, a finance career working at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, a parent escaping the South Tower on 9/11, and false tales of being a volleyball star at Baruch College. 

It wasn’t until more than a month after the election that The New York Times reported on Santos’ dubious claims, which he later admitted fabricating. 

Kessler spent 11 years reporting at Newsday, Long Island’s paper of record, where he was part of two Pulitzer Prize reporting teams. His tenure also included fact-checking Bill Clinton’s haircut on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport in 1993, debunking the “Hairgate” narrative that it caused delays. 

So, the failure of the paper to vet Santos before he was elected still bugs Kessler, who called Newsday “a shell of its former self.” 

“Their bread and butter for decades was exposing corrupt malfeasance by politicians,” Kessler said. “In the Newsday alumni group, there was a lot of commentary that the old Newsday would have completely ended this guy when he was running, it would not have been discovered after the fact.” 

“It’s a real problem we’re facing,” Kessler added, “because there’s less and less scrutiny of local officials.” 

When to use the word ‘lie’

There’s been a lot of debate in media circles during the Trump era about the use of a three-letter word: lie. 

Kessler said he mostly avoided calling any politician’s misstatements a lie because he felt the word was a “conversation stopper.” Former Post editor Marty Baron wasn’t opposed to using the term, but told Kessler, “It has to be the right moment, and you have to be absolutely sure of yourself that you can back this up.” 

Sure enough, a few weeks later, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen released audio recordings of his former boss discussing making payments to two women to silence their claims of alleged affairs — porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Trump had been on the record saying he knew nothing about the payments. While the tapes weren’t proof of sexual misconduct, they were evidence that he was involved in the so-called “catch and kill” plan to keep the stories from going public during the 2016 election. 

“So Marty came to my desk and said, ‘Well, I think you can write that story about a lie. We have him on tape discussing this. So clearly, it’s a lie,’” Kessler said. “So, it actually was a big story: Fact checker declares it’s a lie.” 

Kessler said the difficult thing about calling Trump a liar is that he says things that are clearly false but has convinced himself they’re true. Take, for example, tariffs, which Trump has long advocated for despite economists accurately describing them as a tax on consumers, since companies pass the extra costs along. 

“He keeps saying the countries are paying the tariffs,” Kessler said. “That’s completely false. But is it a lie? He may actually believe this, despite all evidence to the contrary.” 

Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.