This is perhaps an unintentionally depressing story about the purely technical aspects of adapting "fact-checking" journalism to work on television.
What fact-checkers online do with hyperlinks must be done on TV with graphics. These must contain every number and source the fact-checker mentions — but nothing more. This often means losing a lot of contextual information compared to online fact checks.
The uncharitable way to put it is that fact-checking needs to be dumbed down and drama-boosted to work on television, what with short attention spans and so forth, and that hosts in other countries seem to be a bit ahead of us in working out the kinks of this newfangled approach of JESUS CHRIST CAN WE JUST BE TOLD WHEN SOMEONE IS LYING TO OUR FACES HOW HARD CAN THIS—sorry, how the experiments have been going in other countries.
But the depressing part is not the technical details of how to best present "fact checks" of televised claims, but the realization that much of it is incompatible with modern American journalism as practiced. This, for example:
[I]n some of the fact checks by Kallxo in Kosovo: a public figure's lies are exposed through a series of reported videos played back to the very author of the claim.
There's a simple reason why that particular approach won't work in the United States: Any politician so treated will, going forward, refuse further appearances on that program or network, citing the "unfairness" of being proven a liar on camera. Such gotcha moments might have been the hallmarks of, say, a classic-era 60 Minutes broadcast, when hosts and journalists had no particular investment in ever again speaking to their lesser-known targets. But it’s impossible in any format predicated on "interviewing" people of note as the predominant source of content.
Again, the central problem here is that much of modern political journalism considers the "interview" to be the end goal of the political journalist, not a tool for acquiring further information. While print media certainly suffers from this problem, on television it is the default method of operation, period—and is not coincidentally a good part of the reason we're currently suffering from a glut of elected officials whose prime defining characteristic is belligerent, shouting ignorance.
What's a wee bit more curious is how the same blanket unwillingness to confront obvious fraud from top-name political figures translates down to professional issue pundits of no particular note. An obvious example would be climate change or, indeed, any issue of environmental note, where lobbyists for this or that particular industry remain free to pipe up with provably false statements and not only will the audience not be told that the interviewee is concocting false stories, the same person will be invited back to dispense the identical lie on an ongoing basis. We'll have to leave it there, says the forever-incurious Wolf Blitzer, on the frequent occasion that not-lying guest No. 2 is attempting to do the network's own work of calling the bluffs of always-lying guest No. 1. Come back next week and we'll do it all again.
If the network can't fact-check their own supposed issue experts—if the very people who are being brought onto the network to add supposed context to a news story are, as often as not, paid to manipulate public opinion rather than inform it—what are we to make of that? These are people whose public careers are at the mercy of the bookers, not the other way around. If, say, a gun advocate appears on camera and recites line after line of definitive nonsense, including statistics that are made up wholesale, no interviewer or journalist is obliged to call upon them ever again. And yet they do, and regularly, and to the point that entire careers can be made on spouting fraudulent statistics. In many cases, it appears to be considerably more lucrative than researching the real ones.
If you were to hire a plumber to fix your pipes at home and the man proved completely incompetent or even crooked, either leaving things more broken than when he arrived or attempting to con you outright, it's fair to say you'd never call on that particular plumber again.
But this is a reaction that is completely foreign to issue journalism. If there's a lobbyist, activist or straight-up conman who's been barred from a program for repeatedly lying to the audience, I can't recall who it might be. (Sex scandals? Sure. Lying about credentials? Yep. But not for stating false facts.) It's not that fact-checking is technically difficult to do on television. It's that the supposed television "news" culture sees absolutely no value in providing such information to the audience.
It may be dirt cheap to have some intern do some rudimentary Google searches to check whether the things said on your program were factual or need correcting, after all, but you know what would be even cheaper than that? Not doing it!
What's puzzling is that even if the top political names hold ratings power over their supposed watchdogs, proving an everyday lobbyist or issue "expert" to be a fraud would seem to be precisely the sort of glorious personality conflict that cable news thrives upon. What could be more exciting than confronting J. Alfred FossilFuel, Esq., with the uncomfortable news that they apparently do not know even the basic factual information of the thing they are holding forth about? In fact, forget the confrontation. Even this could be presented as titillating fodder, done well:
Having the host of the show present a fact check is not necessarily the most effective approach. A fact-checker engaging with the host on the content creates a more interesting dynamic for the viewer, says Alejandro Olvera of El Objetivo, whose host Ana Pastor initially presented the fact checks herself.
As for concrete proposals, here are three. The ideal case would be for fact-checking to take place in the chyron as each interviewee or panel member holds forth; we're never going to get that, because it would be very difficult, would require "live" interviews to be delayed long enough for the fact-checks to be drawn up, and is otherwise unworkable. But a far simpler solution would be a policy change: If, during any one of the interminable group panel discussions that infest our airwaves with their little colonies of "issue lice" there is disagreement about whether a given fact or statistic is true, informing the audience afterwards as to who was right and who was wrong ought to be a priority of any program that supposes itself to be a serious place for discussion.
The second proposal is that perhaps that result is a score that needs to be kept track of, for recurring panel members. Perhaps instead of hearing that so-and-so is a Senior Policy Analyst at Serious Important Folks, LLC, it would do the audience far more good to know that speaker so-and-so has a blunder rating of 32 centikristols, putting him well into the ranks of people you should probably not listen to regardless of what's printed on his business cards.
The third proposal is a dunk tank. You can come up with the details. What the hell—it's not like anything else has worked.