What does an ethical journalist do when the former president of the United States asserts in a nationally televised debate that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets?
If you’re David Muir, who moderated the September 10 debate for ABC News, you do a quick real-time fact check and counter the false statement, saying that the city manager “told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” That appeared sensible and ethical to his peers and to many media critics (if not to Trump supporters). As a fact-loving journalist, you just can’t let a false and potentially incendiary claim like that stand uncorrected in the moment.
But what do you do if you are the rest of the media? You know that repeating the offensive claim will help amplify it. You know that people who haven’t heard of the charge will learn about it. You know that people who aren’t paying close attention may assume it’s true even as you debunk it.
As the “Brain Matters” columnist and neuroscientist Richard Sima has written in the Washington Post, “the more we see something repeated, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. This ‘illusory truth effect’ arises because we use familiarity and ease of understanding as a shorthand for truth; the more something is repeated, the more familiar and fluent it feels whether it is misinformation or fact.”
With so much misinformation and disinformation (including what’s being generated by AI) polluting our discourse these days, the question of how to refute it is fundamental to the journalism profession—and there are no easy answers. The issue is complicated by the unavoidable fact that we change the environment as we report on it. “Parachuting” into a story from afar has its challenging aspects; as a horde of journalists descended on Springfield post-debate, they inevitably contributed to the disruption of the community. “The media coverage across the board has just added, I think, to everyone’s anxiety,” Tangee Hepp, the manager of a public library branch, told NPR. “I have seen a lot of just random or those independent journalists who are just walking around with their phone interviewing people.”
At the same time, the best of the reports provided a sensitive and factual portrait of the Haitian immigrants in the town, most of whom had arrived legally in pursuit of available jobs.
So is it best, on balance, to ignore false rumors and let them die off, rather than risk fanning the flames?
I’d start with the premise that our core job as journalists is to discover facts, verify claims, and replace false statements with accurate ones whenever an issue is so important that the public will benefit from knowing the correct answer. When the facts are nuanced, we need to explain that. When they are clear, we too need to be crystal-clear that a particular allegation is flat-out false. We don’t need to do so multiple times, but one strong refutation is essential.
A good way to report and then debunk a widely circulating false rumor without unnecessarily amplifying it is by using a so-called truth sandwich, a strategy developed by Berkeley cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff. As PBS explained it: “Here’s how to build one: Lead with the truth. In the middle of the report, briefly describe the falsehood. And then fact-check the misinformation and repeat the truth.”
Here’s how Yamiche Alcindor, then of PBS NewsHour, did so back in 2020: “It’s been a few days since VP nominee Kamala Harris joined Joe Biden’s ticket & birtherism attacks have begun…. a Trump campaign advisor is openly questioning whether Harris is eligible to be on the ticket. Harris was born in the U.S. & is clearly eligible.”
(Employing the truth sandwich, or at least leading with the truth before introducing the falsehood, as the Wall Street Journal does, is also an ethical way to write corrections so as not to compound one’s mistake.)
In our polarized environment, we need to assume that many people won’t believe us no matter how well we report. We also need to recognize that what we produce will be a drop in the bucket compared with the volume of false information circulating on social media. We’ll do our best to identify our sources, explain their credentials, and provide as much factual detail as we can. But it often won’t be enough in a nation in which most people distrust us.
So why bother?
First, reporting what’s factual and what’s not is our role in society and what we’ve signed up to do. We owe it to audiences who do seek us out, who keep us in business, and who generally respect our work to do what we’ve promised them. As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in The Elements of Journalism, “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”
Second, and perhaps just as importantly, we owe it to history to provide a credible first draft, regardless of what people think of our work today. Who knows, what we report may matter a great deal five, ten, or even twenty years from now.
For these reasons, you certainly don’t decide in advance to leave real-time fact-checking primarily in the hands of the opposing candidates, as CBS did prior to the vice presidential debate on October 1. But even these unfortunate terms couldn’t stop co-moderator Margaret Brennan from correcting J.D. Vance’s statement about the perils of “illegal immigrants” in Springfield. With her journalistic instincts kicking in, she responded, as journalists must, with the facts: “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status…” Vance, insisting on the opportunity to respond, also took the opportunity to invoke the agreement that shouldn’t have been there in the first place: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check…”
Have additional thoughts? Think we’re missing something? Email us to keep the conversation going.
Additional reporting by Jordan D. Brown.
This article was produced in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism Review.
Photo via iStock. Illustration: Katie Kosma.