THE TICKET

BY EMILY BALTZ

“Joe the Plumber” wasn’t actually running for office, but he certainly became a focal point of last year’s presidential campaign. Republicans rallied in support of Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher after the third presidential debate on Oct. 16, when Republican presidential candidate John McCain proclaimed that Wurzelbacher would face much higher taxes under Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s tax plan.

McCain’s denouncement of Obama’s plan may have boosted his image and encouraged his supporters, but there was a little problem with his attack. His description of the effect the Obama plan would have on Wurzelbacher’s finances simply wasn’t accurate.

In reality, Wurzelbacher’s taxes would go up only if his income increased to more than $200,000 per year and his small business would be exempt from Obama’s requirement to provide insurance coverage for all of its workers. McCain’s working-class hero wouldn’t be greatly harmed by Obama’s plan after all.

Despite the untruth, the McCain campaign, its supporters and the media continued to promote “Joe the Plumber” and he became a defining symbol of the Republican campaign. For the most part, the mainstream media allowed the “Joe the Plumber” myth to persist, probably because it provided an entertaining story.The “Joe the Plumber” tax story is one of the more prominent examples, but it is certainly not the only time during this campaign that untruths were reported as fact in the mainstream media while less-known “truth squadding” Web sites such as FactCheck.org, which filed several reports dealing with the inaccuracies in the “Joe the Plumber” story, fact-checked the candidates’ campaign ads, speeches and debate performances in an attempt to convey reality. In fact, some fact-checkers reported that not only had McCain incorrectly portrayed the way Obama’s tax plan would affect Wurzelbacher’s finances, but he had also mispronounced his name, calling him “Joe Wurzelberger.”

The “Joe the Plumber” story provides evidence of the wide range of fact-checking in the election — the fact-checks ranged from the trivial and entertaining (the pronunciation of Wurzelbacher’s name) to the more serious (the actual misrepresentation of the tax plan). But, more importantly, the story also brings to light some of the problems fact-checking Web sites faced during the campaign in trying to communicate which information was accurate. Despite its inaccuracies, the “Joe the Plumber” frame remained a fixture of both McCain campaign rhetoric and media coverage of the Republican campaign.

Fact-checking was certainly more wide-spread during this election than it has been in the past. In 2004, FactCheck.org was the premiere “truth squad,” and one of the only Web sites with a fact-checking desk. In fact, in a 2007 book titled “UnSpun: Finding Fact in a World of Disinformation,” which he wrote with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org. Brooks Jackson, FactCheck.org’s director, described a “flurry of ‘fact-check’-style reports in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign,” but said that group of reports had represented a definite departure from the norm at the time, when fact checking was generally rare.

During this election, though, it sometimes seemed that everyone had a fact-check desk. The St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly started a fact-checking branch, PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post started another fact-checking blog. Most major news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN and Fox had fact-checking desks. Even blogs that did not have an official “truth squad,” such as DailyKos.com, frequently posted blurbs that pointed out inaccurate statements candidates had made. ABC and CNN both included fact-checking segments during their televised coverage of all three presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. Between late August and election day, CNN also ran at least three different segments pointing out inaccuracies in both campaigns’ advertisements as part of its election coverage.

Different fact-checking groups used different scales to evaluate statements’ accuracy.FactCheck.org categorized candidate’s statements as “true,” “false” and “almost true,” among other headings, while PolitiFact.com ranked statements on a “truth-o-meter” that included measurements of accuracy such as “pants on fire” for glaringly untrue statements. Statements with “pants-on-fire” ratings included some made in an Obama-Biden ad that suggested that McCain opposed federal funding for stem-cell research and some in a McCain-Palin ad claiming the Obama-Biden ticket opposed clean coal. Another independent fact-checking site, Ameritocracy.com, published articles evaluating accuracy instead of categorizing them with short headings. The Washington Post’s fact-checking blog, written by Michael Dobbs, used a “Pinocchio” measurement system — the more “Pinocchios” a statement registered, the less true it was.

But, regardless of what scale they used or what material they covered, fact-checking sites provided a wealth of information about inaccuracies. An article on Oregonlive.com titled “Fact-checking: Does Anyone Care?” reported that FactCheck.org staff members had posted five new entries on the site during the third presidential debate. The Washington Post’s fact-check crew posted 13. PolitiFact.com’s server was down during the debate, but staff writers sent out fact-check results over a live feed on another Web site, Twitter.com.

Fact-checking pioneers such as Jackson and Jamieson seem pleased with how much fact-checking has expanded in the last four years, but believe there is still more room for improvement. On Dec. 12, 2008 , the two released the results of a survey proving, they said in a press release summarizing the results, that though “we saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before … millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.” The survey concluded, among other things, that more than half of American adults believed Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses, a claim that was prominent in McCain campaign ads and was the basis for the “Joe the Plumber” story. In reality, few businesses would see such an increase under the plan.

“There were three major fact-checking Web sites during this election,” Jackson said in an interview. “We were the only one in 2004. A lot of major media outlets had them, and yet it’s not enough. It doesn’t counteract the false impression advertising creates.”

In the article, Jackson and Jamieson explained that voters’ pre-dispositions could influence what the believed, but that there was a less abstract obstacle: Visibility. Far more people view political ads than visit FackCheck.org, which was read by 462,678 visitors on its best day during election season, the article explains. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign aired two inaccurate ads claiming that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits a total of 17,614 times. Each airing was viewed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and the campaign spent more on those two ads than FactCheck.org spends in an entire year.

“Political ads are viewed hundreds of times, and fact-check blurbs were only posted once,” Jackson said. “We’re working against the weight of advertising in target states — people get bombarded.”

Not only did more people see inaccurate campaign ads than the fact-check blurbs correcting them, mainstream media added to the problem by presenting inaccurate information in prominent places. Though there were not viewership figures available for specific articles, a New York Times online media guide reported that the paper’s Web site averaged 143,488,000 daily viewers, more than 310 times the Web traffic FactCheck.org received on its best day. The New York Times average viewership does not include people that may have read articles in a hard-copy of the paper.

But, those frequently read front-page pieces often contain inaccurate information. For example, an Oct. 17 recap of the debate published on the front page of the New York Times mentioned McCain’s “Joe the Plumber” anecdote but did not include any mention of the questions fact-checkers had raised about the story’s accuracy.

Heather Collura, a journalist who worked for USA Today during the election season said she hadn’t necessarily fact-checked everything candidates said during a speech or press conference before writing an article. She said it was her job to report on what the candidates were saying and let the public draw its own conclusions, not to evaluate the truth of candidates’ statements. She said she had occasionally looked into glaringly inaccurate information and had never intentionally reported anything inaccurate, but had generally left fact-checking candidates to “truth squads.”

Because Web sites such as Factcheck.org focused only on fact-checking, not regular campaign coverage, visitors to the sites were specifically seeking out fact-checking information and probably had a vested interest in the campaign. Meanwhile, people who visited the New York Times’ Web site for sports coverage or reviews of their favorite television shows often saw headlines on stories containing inaccurate information, even if they did not set out to do so. This means that many of the people who read about “Joe the Plumber” or Obama’s assertions about McCain’s policy on stem-cell research probably never saw fact-checks correcting the inaccuracies.

Official corrections regarding incorrect information in stories were also rare. In fact, a brief look through the corrections that were published in the New York Times during election season revealed that the paper did not correct reports about what candidates had said during debates and speeches. The few corrections to election-related stories were published inside the paper with little attention drawn to them.

Jackson said mainstream media should take more responsibility for fact-checking.

“They should be more careful about reporting and correcting false information,” he said.

Collura said it could be difficult to decide when publishing a correction was warranted, as corrections were generally used to correct reporters’ mistakes, not candidates’.

“It’s tricky,” she said, noting that candidates’ errors usually went uncorrected as long as the reporting was accurate.

Relying on fact-check desks to correct inaccuracies presented a problem during the election, though, because even on frequently visited mainstream media Web sites, it was often hard to access fact-check results. On the New York Times’ Web site, for example, stories containing inaccurate information could be easily accessed from the homepage. Reports about fact-checking were published on the political coverage section of the Web site and took at least four clicks to access.

Therefore, the fact-check reports were only seen by people that were already interested enough in the election to view the site’s political page. The fact-checker’s not-so-prominent location also meant that the onus of finding out whether or not candidates were being truthful was placed on voters instead of on the media, and that, in all likelihood, only select voters ever saw the Times’ fact-check results.

Jackson said accessibility and visibility went hand in hand, and that part of the struggle fact-checkers faced was that only people with a vested interest in politics saw fact-checking results, leaving the average American voter uninformed.

Jackson also said one problem with fact-checking was that Americans were not necessarily conditioned to evaluate statements logically. He said schools could help with this problem by teaching critical thinking and using Web sites like FactCheck.org as a classroom tool.

“People have to be trained to think logically,” he said.

Problems with visibility, accessibility, corrections and logical thinking have left some fact-checkers frustrated, but not disillusioned. In their piece introducing the survey results, Jackson and Jamieson said Americans’ misinformation about election issues did not bode well for the nation’s future, and that untruths in advertising campaigns made candidates hard to trust. Though the results are frustrating, Jackson and Jamieson say they are not discouraged.

“Not at all,” the piece concludes. “If we hadn’t tried, it might have been worse.”

Even though many Americans are still uninformed, some campaign officials said fact-checking had affected the campaign as politicians began to more carefully consider how they phrased their ads. One McCain aide , who asked to remain anonymous because of a campaign policy that prohibits campaign aides from identifying themselves, said he understood the benefits of fact-checking but that it could get “ridiculous.” He said candidates were so worried about being made to look like liars that they were afraid to be forthcoming and candid.

But, Jackson said, he didn’t think fact-checking was greatly affecting campaigns.

“They’ll use it against the other side,” he said. “But mostly [they think] it’s just noise. I haven’t seen evidence that they’ve modified their behavior in any but the smallest ways.”

Jackson also said fact-checkers’ major concerns were not with campaigns. Instead, he said, their goal was to keep voters informed.

“We access statements at their merits,” he said. “Our audience is voters.”

He said that though he did not believe influencing campaigns should be journalists’ main goal, it was a bonus.

“If someone is out there saying they can’t lie because we’ll expose them, good,” he said.

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