It took a while for Jay Rosen's suggestion that the Sunday morning political shows embrace a more rigorous form of factchecking, but now the discussion is blooming. ABC News's Jake Tapper, as you probably already know, has been the public face of enthusiasm for the idea. Meanwhile, at "Meet The Press", they are waaay into some new furniture, and so an outside group has come to the fore with "Meet The Facts", a website dedicated to helping to "bring factchecking" to the show.
Michael Calderone's got all of this on lock, today, and along the way, he's got "Face The Nation" host Bob Schieffer on the record, basically playing this particular ball down the middle.
Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation," similarly described his role as "the front line of fact-checking"; when a guest makes a dubious claim, he's there to ask follow-up questions.
And if an inaccurate statement slips by, Schieffer said he expects that viewers and media-monitoring groups on the left and right will call attention to it quickly, noting that "everybody's welcome to fact-check us all they want."
While I'm glad to hear Schieffer similarly put himself on the line like that, I'm a bit disappointed. While he's right that third parties typically come to the fore to serve that purpose, the thing that separates ABC News at this point is that they've decided to become the brand that takes fact-checking seriously.
Also! It's probably a little under-appreciated at this point, but if you go back and watch Tapper on the "Colbert Report" again, it's also clear that ABC News wants to be the brand that acknowledges that they aren't perfect and aren't above taking extra measures to get it right. I like to think that might matter to people over the long run! Meanwhile, "Meet The Press" is the brand that just can't be bothered to do anything at all.
Making the case for fact-checking the Sunday chat [Yahoo News' The Newsroom]
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