Fact-checking needs to make way for reality-testing and gaslighting-fighting | Press Watch

Donald Trump literally laughs factchecking off - it's good to have, but insufficient. To establish non-partisan status, factcheckers need to be equally tough on all sides, but all sides don't lie the same. They use euphemisms for 'lie', and check narrow, easy-to-debunk statements while ignoring the larger pattern of "the asymmetry in lying".

More problematically, they're read by the converted, not by those who need to, who are v. unlikely to believe it anyway. Lies are frequently told 1000 times and factchecked once. Journalists are not calling the politicians out - no negative consequence for lying.

The ground has not ceased moving under journalism's feet for several decades: the sheer scale of the Trumpist GOP recently is new, and journalism is still catching up. Factchecking is "from a time when individual lies stood out... when we were confident that falsehoods, once sniffed out and corrected, would disappear from our shared narrative"

The job's changed: https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1171967361919987712 :

• call out lies as lies (no more euphemisms!), state the facts without reinforcing the falsehood, using images
• don't just publish: "use whatever forms of moral, public, or where appropriate regulatory pressure are available to stop the spread of specific bits of misinformation”
• assess overall credibility, not just individual nitpicks... paint a comprehensive picture of a politician’s accuracy may impose reputational costs
• Provide a compelling storyline or mental framework for the truth, replacing falsehood with positive content
• Discredit the source - attach their motives as a story hook
• Recognise and address gaslighting - Trump knows "that repetition is one of the keys to making people believe something that is patently untrue."