Joe Biden and the twilight of the ‘fact-checkers’

Now that the ‘adults’ are back in charge, and the populist hothead Donald Trump is out of the picture, journalists can afford to put their feet up. Relax – old, reliable Uncle Joe’s got this.

At least that was the impression the media gave when Joe Biden was elected, and it’s been compounded as the president reaches his first 100 days in office this week.

The Washington Post – whose masthead proudly bears the slogan ‘democracy dies in darkness’ – has announced it will no longer maintain its fact-checking database of Joe Biden’s claims.

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If journalists applied the same forensic and ferocious approach to Biden’s comments as they did to Trump’s, they could have a field day (or at least a lot of fun). Did ‘230million thousand’ Americans really lose their loved ones to Covid? Did we ever establish whether the young woman who confronted Biden after the Iowa caucuses was really a ‘lying, dog-faced pony soldier?’? Did Joe really have a higher IQ and more stamina than the voter he called ‘fat’ and a ‘liar’ before challenging him to a push-up contest? Whenever Biden has a slightly puzzling – dare I say, Trumpian – outburst, the journalistic instinct is to call it a gaffe rather than mobilise the newsroom’s fact-checking unit.

No doubt Trump had a propensity for untruths – or ‘alternative facts’, as Kellyanne Conway infamously described them – not least because his speech was so unguarded, unfiltered and unscripted. But the ostentatious fact-checking used against Trump was less about sorting truth from lies than it was about serving an ideological purpose. It signalled a (never actually substantiated) separation of the pre-Trump era from the Trumpian, post-truth era. President Bush may have lied to take the nation to war, but this apparently never crossed the boundaries into ‘post-truth’ in the way Trump’s ramblings did (not least because so many in journalism were implicated in Bush’s lies). Fact-checking became a performance of opposition to Trump, of resistance to his wicked regime.