When President Joe Biden steps to the House rostrum on Tuesday night to deliver the State of the Union address, every word he utters will be scrutinized by an army of fact-checkers.
The State of the Union has been called “the Super Bowl of fact-checking,” a night that brings out not just the regulars from PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and The Associated Press, but also reporters from a host of other news organizations who check every claim the president makes.
They’ll be wasting their time on the wrong guy.
Biden is already one of the most fact-checked politicians in America. PolitiFact, the site I founded, has rated him 252 times. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale regularly examines Biden’s claims for exaggerations and misstatements, as does FactCheck.org.
That’s a sign of the lopsided focus of American fact-checkers. They have put most of their attention on Washington because national politics are bigger in every way. The battles are bigger — and so are the audiences for their shows and websites. And those audiences matter, even for nonprofit organizations such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. Editors need to show their funders that lots of people care about this unique accountability journalism.
But the journalists are putting too much attention on national politicians such as Biden and Donald Trump, who are well-checked. The real need is at the state and local levels. A report last fall by my Duke colleagues Erica Ryan, Mark Stencel and Belen Bricchi found a troubling...
The Southeast National Vice Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Barr. Ray Nnaji said that widespread claims of a leadership crisis in the party stem from misinterpreting recent court r...