I’m Amanda, and I’m a semi-regular fact checker at GQ. That means I get paid to make sure stuff that gets published in the magazine is true. Most of the time, fact checking isn’t a job many people want to do. When I first learned what fact checking was, I literally grimaced and thought, “I will never do that job.” Then I learned about another thing called “economic reality.” But I’ve come to love fact checking, sort of, some of the time.
Anyway, I think I can speak for fact checkers everywhere when I say that this election has been a heady time. Suddenly everyone in the country wants to do our job. At least seven news outlets live fact checked the first presidential debate, along with every single person on Twitter. Traffic on NPR.com hit an all-time high when they live-annotated the debate transcript. It was clear we’d hit peak-fact-check when it was the subject of SNL’s opening monologue last week. The video released on Friday puts us at post-peak-fact-check—a video that no one, including Trump, is even trying to deny.
Not to be Debbie Downer here, but everyone should stop trying to fact check this election. Here’s why.
The idea that debate moderators should be live fact checking completely misconstrues what fact checking is. When we’re checking features for the magazine, we second- and third-source as much as possible. We call people on the phone. We look for contradictory information and we investigate those sources too. We background check everyone who appears in the story. We do all this after a writer has reported the story, so ideally she’s done some of this stuff too. Then we hash out the inconsistencies with the writer and the editor.
So sure, it’s possible to prove in about two seconds that Hillary Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership “the gold standard in trade agreements” in 2012. So what? If I fact checked a story simply by Googling quotes, I’d be fired. Is there a video of the statement? What did she say before and after the line in question? How did she say it? Where was she and who was her audience? What was the global situation at the time? Has she repeated the line since? In what contexts? Considering all this, what does the statement show about her? Catching someone in a contradiction is easy, but usually it’s besides the point.
A recent article by Peter Pomerantsev in Granta argued that we’re living in a post-fact world. Not only are politicians lying, they’re lying easily and without conscience. “All that matters is that the lie is clickable,” writes Pomerantsev. I think he’s right, though some amount of bullshit has always been baked into the political process. It’s called rhetoric. It’s called getting people to vote for you.
Presidential campaigns, more so than state and local elections, are run on feelings over facts. And Trump’s campaign is emotional AF. "It’s not nice. And I don’t deserve that,” he says when Clinton brings up his derogatory comments about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. Megan Kelly “behaved very nasty” to him when she asked about comments he’d made about other women.
The emotions go beyond Trump himself. When Mike Pence told CNN that Putin “has been stronger on the world stage than [Obama’s] administration,” I asked my boss, GQ Research Director Luke Zaleski, how he’d fact check that. “You can’t,” he said. “It depends on your definition of the word ‘strength,’ for one, and embracing this idea that there’s a world stage and defining what it means.” Same for Trump’s statement that America isn’t as safe for Americans as it used to be. “He’s dealing with people’s entertainment processing systems, not their intellectual processing systems,” said Luke. “He’s saying, ‘Don’t you feel that?’”
The video of Trump’s “locker-room banter” with Billy Bush is the worst we’ve seen of him, and there’s really no need to fact check it. The feelings it’s inspiring in Americans (nausea, mainly) are probably strong enough to move the presidency out of his reach.
Feelings are stronger than facts. When we’re fact checking the magazine, we try to make sure the facts win. But we’re not running for president, we’re trying to sell magazines without getting sued.
You’re already reading this article so I don’t need to tell you that we live in a world where content is constantly streaming into our eyes and ears and brains. Ask a question to the internet, and millions of answers crowd around you, clamoring to be heard. Sifting through those answers requires not only parsing information but parsing sources. Search algorithms are built to feed you what you already believe. And as Luke put it, “You can find ten sources out there that will tell you that Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Four score and seven years ago.’”
It’s not always clear who runs, writes, and funds the information on your screen. National newspapers and their websites are some of the most trusted sources, which is ironic because they typically don’t have dedicated fact checkers on staff.
If you’re doing it right, fact checking shows you how slippery facts can be. When I’m checking a story for the magazine, I know I’m doing it right if I get to a point where I'm completely confused. That’s when I can really start digging in. Because fact checking only works if you let yourself doubt what you thought you knew, whether it’s about sex offenders, police shootings, serial killers, veterans with PTSD, or celebrity trainers.
Luke described the process of fact checking as filling a vase with water to find the cracks. You fill it again and again until it holds, and you hope it holds forever but it probably won’t. That’s why all you armchair fact checkers should save your strength. This election doesn’t give a shit about your facts, but it’s a battle worth fighting long after November 8th.