Facts Facts Facts!

FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson.
Photo courtesy of FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson Speaks Out

The moment Vice President Dick Cheney mentioned FactCheck.org, during the Vice Presidential debate on October 5, everything changed. Even though he incorrectly gave out the name as "FactCheck.com," viewers managed to find the site, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Political Policy Center. Almost instantly, FactCheck.org was bombarded by over 100 hits per second, says Brooks Jackson, director of the nonpartisan Anneberg Political Fact Check organization responsible for the site. In the week following the first presidential debate, on September 30, the site's daily average hit count--29,000--doubled. Cheney's remarks prompted a total of over 368,000 web users to flood the site in the hours following the debate. No one was more astonished by the site's sudden popularity than Jackson. FactCheck.org has since maintained phenomenal popularity among political analysts and the general public alike, proving that the site's success "may imply a greater need for fact-checking outside of corporate media," says Jackson.
Jackson attributes what he believes are the inadequacies of the mainstream media's fact-checking to journalists' limited amount of time, as well as the media's tendency to use what Jackson calls a "paint-by-numbers formula," which places the factually inaccurate comments made in campaign ads, political debates, or in interviews with political officials on the backburner. When the media does in fact comment on politicians' misinformation or disinformation, says Jackson, such fact-checks have traditionally been buried somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph of an article hidden in the middle of a paper. Jackson, a seasoned political journalist, helped create FactCheck.org with the hope of changing such journalistic practices.
Originally, he and the project's co-director, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, had imagined FactCheck.org would be "mostly a service to news organizations...small news organizations," who traditionally lack the human and financial resources for adequate fact-checking, says Jackson. Jackson, who has reported on national politics for 34 years, racking up bylines in the Associate Press and The Wall Street Journal, is accustomed to the high demands placed on reporters. Since the 1992 Presidential Election, when he began investigating questionable political statements and advertisements for CNN, Jackson has been at the forefront of political fact-checking.
As a result of his extensive history in political reporting, Jackson has thoroughly explored the responsibilities of both the press and public when it comes to fact-checking. In his article "False Ads: There Oughtta Be a Law! Or, Maybe Not," published on FactCheck.org, Jackson notes a "fact that may surprise you: candidates have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want." It may sound shocking, reports Jackson, but "people have more consumer protection for soap or beer [advertisements] than for candidates running for office." According to Jackson, "consumers have been protected for decades from false ads for commerical products," while truth-in-advertising laws for political commercials do not exist. The Federal Communications Act (Title 47, Sec. 315) allows "any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station;" however, even if broadcasters believe an ad to be misleading or offensive, "that such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast." He does not foresee a solution in the near future, considering that the protection of free speech, offered by the First Amendment, is "tricky," and censoring false political ads or accusations "hasn't been done affectively anywhere." However, Jackson does take comfort from the message that his investigations have sent to the media and the news-consuming public: "in a free and open society, responsibility rests on the voters and the news media to sort out what is true and what is not." As Jackson writes in the article cited above

Nobody said Democracy was supposed to be easy. It is of course the job of news organizations to assist; that's why the First Amendment guarantees a free press as well as free speech. We at FactCheck.org try hard to help. But on Election Day, it's up to [the voter].

Jackson believes that the overwhelmingly positive and prolific response to FactCheck.org is "a message for mainstream media." In Jackson's opinion, " a lot of people are looking for some kind of neutral source to sort out the bewildering claims candidates make," and that, he implies, is exactly what FactCheck.org has become.
In response to the worried hope, expressed by the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk, that "fact-checking does not die as fast as it was born," Jackson assures news consumers that FactCheck.org will continue indefinitely, thanks to continued funding by the Annenberg Political Policy Center. Following the 2004 Presidential Election, FactCheck.org will move on to "report on the major factual claims being made from Washington through the remainder of 2004, and into 2005 and beyond." One of the only changes to the site, hopes Jackson, will be a "Letter to the Editors Page," in order to offer FactCheck.org visitors a chance to publicly voice their opinions of the work being done on the site.
According to Jackson, the 2004 Presidential Election, where "vastly more money and an unusual volume of ads" proliferated, is distinctly different from other races in three ways: The increase in allotted personal donations to candidates (a raise from $1,000 to $2,000), which McCain-Feingold legislation changed; the use of the Internet as a fundraising device; and what Jackson wryly calls American's intense feeling that the "earth will collapse into a black hole if the other candidate is reelected." Thus, in a historically tense political climate, FactCheck.org has had its work cut out for it. As stated in an October 25 Washington Post editorial, FactCheck.org "may not have kept the political debate honest," but, at the very least, it was successful in helping to raise the collective political consciousness of an exceptionally polarized America.