Donald Trump has made roughly 500 false statements
in his first 200 days in office.
That’s about 2.5 falsehoods per day.
He’s turned news outlets into full-time
fact-checking organizations.
Give us a fact-check here.
Let’s just do a quick fact-check.
Quick fact-check.
Uh oh, time to fact-check.
The problem is, for a lot of people, those
fact-checks don’t seem to be working.
Two-thirds of Republican voters still believe
millions of people voted illegally.
A majority of Trump’s supporters think Obama
spied on him.
And almost half actually think Trump won the
popular vote.
How is that possible?
Why is bullshit so hard to debunk?
To understand what makes misinformation so
durable in politics, I talked to Brendan Nyhan.
He’s a political scientist who’s been
studying the science of fact-checking since
before Destiny’s Child broke up.
I’ve been working on this now for more than
15 years in different ways.
I was one of the founders of a website called
Spinsanity that was a forerunner to the existing
fact-checking websites.
I checked, and you can actually still find
Spinsanity online in all its beautiful, early-2000s
internet glory.
Oof, look at that font!
Sorry.
Since then, he’s spent a lot of time researching
what makes people hold on to false beliefs.
I came back to that in my research as a political
scientist and returned to the subject of
In theory, this should be a no-brainer.
If someone has a false belief, and you present
them with accurate information, they should
change that false belief, right?
Right?
There’s good evidence, including from my
own research, that
Balls.
Unfortunately, he’s right.
In a recent experiment, for example, people
were asked to read an article debunking Trump’s
false claim that violent crime is on the rise.
And though some people accepted the fact-check,
most of those who initially believed the myth
continued to believe it.
We can observe some responsiveness if we give
people information, but it doesn’t seem
to be enough to make these misperceptions
go away.
There are a couple of big reasons why this
happens.
One is:
It’s costly just to say, “I was wrong.”
That’s hard for me.
That’s hard for anybody.
We’d all like to think we’re dispassionate,
but
That defensiveness is even stronger when a
false belief is linked to a political party
or president.
If you identify as a Republican, and a fact-checker
tells you a Republican belief is wrong, you’re
more likely to reject the fact-check.
Fox & Friends starts right now.
We’ve always had misperceptions, but now
they’re becoming aligned with our partisanship
and our partisan identities and that’s kind
of supercharging them in terms of their relevance
to our political conversation.
At the same time, the cost of sustaining a
false belief is very low in politics.
Being wrong about stuff like voter fraud or
Obama’s birth certificate has no real impact
on our day-to-day lives, so there’s very
low incentive to change our false beliefs.
Having a strictly accurate belief on the one
hand versus having your own sense of yourself
and your worldview called into question, you
can see how sometimes people, without intending to
By the way, Nyhan says this is true of both
liberals and conservatives.
Being a beta male cuck does not make you magically
immune to this.
Dammit!
A second reason it’s so hard to debunk misinformation
has more to do with how we fact-check.
Modern news media is incentivized to be attention-grabbing and immediate.
To report what Trump says and does the moment
it happens.
New Trump tweet coming out.
Trump just tweeted.
I just want to interrupt because President
Trump just tweeted.
I sat down about 21 minutes ago and President
Trump has tweeted three times, so this is
hot off the presses.
Oh, wow.
It’s why news networks started airing full,
unedited Trump rallies during the campaign.
It’s why they started airing the White House
press briefing live.
Every major website has a tribe of content
gnomes in the basement furiously typing up
articles aggregating the news saying, ‘Trump
says this,’ right?
Side note: “Content gnome” is my actual
Dungeons and Dragons character name.
Can you focus, please?
The emphasis on immediacy means that a lot
of misinformation is presented in a totally
unfiltered fashion.
Last December, for example, Trump claimed
that he’d gotten Sprint to stop from outsourcing
5,000 jobs to other countries.
Because of what’s happening and the spirit
and the hope, I was just called by the head
people at Sprint and they’re going to be
bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States.
It was a big declaration, and newsrooms across
the country rushed to report it, repeating
the claim over and over in headlines and tweets
and news chyrons.
Sprint is bringing 5,000 jobs back to America.
The problem was Trump’s claim was false.
Sprint had planned to bring those jobs to
the US even before Trump got elected.
It’s only later that day or the next day
or the day after that that we find out that
actually those were jobs that had already
been saved.
Those follow-up stories often get much less
of an audience and the damage may already
have been done.
That problem is compounded when news networks
invite Trump surrogates and White House spokespeople
to defend Trump’s claims on air.
People like Kris Kobach or Stephen Miller
or…
What?
I don’t want to say her name.
A popular convention in journalism is that
it’s important to interview White House
spokespeople, but Nyhan says that norm breaks
down when those spokespeople use interviews
to repeat misinformation.
The idea that we must interview representatives
of the administration only works if there’s a
But we don’t have that shared commitment.
So far Trump’s spokespeople have used these
interviews to repeat falsehoods about things
like voter fraud, even while being fact-checked
by the hosts.
Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular
vote by 3 to 5 million votes?
You know, we may never know the answer to
that.
Voter fraud is a serious problem in this country.
There are dead people registered; there are
illegal people registered.
And continuing to invite spokespeople like
this on air essentially defeats the purpose
of fact-checking.
You make wild and controversial claims on
TV and you get invited back.
You’re an interesting guest.
You’re provocative.
You’re controversial.
Which explains why, when Alisyn Camerota asks
this Trump supporter where she heard that
millions of people voted illegally,
So where are you getting your information?
She says,
From the media.
Some of it was CNN, I believe.
None of this is to say that better fact-checking
will suddenly fix our misinformation problem.
Even without Kellyanne Conway’s help, the
human brain is really good at holding on to
bullshit.
I convinced myself to wear cargo shorts in
public for 20 years despite overwhelming evidence
it was a bad idea.
Why are you mad at me?
And Nyhan admits there’s not really a silver
bullet for debunking people’s incorrect
political beliefs.
If I knew what it was, I’d be out there
doing it instead of us doing this interview.
Hurtful, but okay.
But the bottom line is our brains are uniquely
vulnerable to a White House that’s so comfortable
with lying.
News networks need to be extra careful that,
in the rush to cover Trump’s falsehoods,
they’re not accidentally amplifying them.
