Years ago, people used to ask me what journalists should do to combat the nation’s drift toward “factish” and “truthy” logic. What was needed, I’d reply with misplaced confidence, is robust fact-checking. If news media were more aggressive in calling people out for lying, I predicted, they’d be less likely to do so with impunity.
Well, in the years since I prescribed that remedy, Snopes and PolitiFact have come of age, and newspapers and TV news outlets have beefed up their fact-checking operations. Indeed, fact-checking has become a minor industry.
To the contrary, politicians and partisans are more likely than ever to cry “Fake news!