By Nkele Martin
Regina-based political columnist and podcaster Jeet Heer gave a keynote address at the Reimagining Political Journalism conference that audibly amused the room when its title — “Fact-Checking Won’t Save Democracy” — was announced.
Heer, who writes for New York City’s The Nation, prefaced his speech by announcing it was a “provocation,” an attempt to make listeners think about “why something that is one of the best parts of journalism, this commitment to facts…why it isn’t quite working — and to think of strategies around it.”
In the last 10 years there has been a resurgence of fact-checking and a gradual shift in its role, Heer said.
The coinciding rise of former and future U.S. president Donald Trump, disinformation and genuine journalism branded as “fake news” pushed fact-checking to the forefront of North American news. There was, said Heer, a “belief that journalism has to respond to this crisis.”
“There was an idea that… (the) consensus of truth was breaking down, so you needed to elevate fact-checking to (be) not something that’s done behind the scenes, but something that is actually done upfront and involved in the political system.”
As a result, Heer said the number of fact-checking departments worldwide grew significantly. “There became a sort of cottage industry of reporting Trump’s lies, responding to them,” he said.
As hinted at in the name of his talk, Heer believes this strategy did not entirely work. There was an oversight of a “crucial point” about today’s political landscape.
“The fragmentation (of society) that’s encouraged by social media is part of a larger fragmentation and atomization of social life,” he said.
“We’re used to the political spectrum of left and right, but I think that in the current moment, the actual political system has been reconfigured and it is pro-system and anti-system,” he said.
He referenced the company that both 2024 U.S. presidential candidates kept, with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris welcoming the support of “system-aligned” individuals.
“It’s basically the party (with) people who think ‘the American system is basically good. It needs reforms here and there, but it’s OK.’ ”
‘This is a problem that we have as journalists. The very tools we have, of fact-checking and discovering scandal, the anti-system politician has an immune system to that.’
— Keynote speaker Jeet Heer, columnist and podcaster with The Nation
Epitomized by his recent appointments — such as tech titan Elon Musk as a government “efficiency” expert, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary — president-elect Trump and his cohort operated as “anti-system” politicians.
Heer said the message coming from these politicians is that “the system is corrupt,” which acts as a kind of “superpower” protecting them from conventional critiques.
“It immunizes them against certain things that journalism can normally do,” he said.
“This is a problem that we have as journalists. The very tools we have, of fact-checking and discovering scandal, the anti-system politician has an immune system to that.”
Heer cited a “breaking down of hegemony” through a series of events in the last two decades that have eroded trust in systems and made large populations amenable to the ideas of anti-system politicians.
Heer claimed fact-checking failed in part because it was “used and weaponized by pro-system people as a way of protecting the status quo and protecting it from legitimate critique.”
He mentioned a lengthy fact-check by the Washington Post on Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’ comment on the six wealthiest people in the world having as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population.
While Sanders’ numbers were factually correct, the Post gave it a three-Pinocchios truth rating because it lacked “nuance about wealth accumulation and debt in the United States.”
Heer said he was flabbergasted by that logic.
“If this is your fact check, doesn’t this begin to question the whole task of fact-checking?” Heer asked.
Heer described this and similar instances as “fact-checking that shuts down debate.”
He said that while fact-checking is vital, journalists who depict facts as a one-way street and discourage debate, can alienate the public and breed mistrust.
“As journalists, maybe the rethink that we need to do is with a lot of these questions, not (only focus on) why people got the facts wrong…. But where they are coming from,” he said.
“I think a lot of the stuff that we are seeing, of people’s skepticism and doubt — even distrust of what we do — comes from good places. We have to meet them at those good places, and that’s how we can engage them so that they don’t end up at the bad places.”
Immediately after his address, Heer was joined by award-winning journalist and author Andrew Cohen, a former Carleton journalism professor, and Carleton University Master of Journalism student Sarah St-Pierre for a panel discussion on the topic, followed by an audience Q&A session.