Joe Biden and the twilight of the "fact-checkers"

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. What the craze for fact-checking was really responding to was less Trump himself than his voters. The fact-check embodied one of the most irritating and arrogant aspects of the liberal mindset, that says ‘my views are based on facts – yours on dangerous ignorance’. If only the voters had been in possession of the correct facts on that fateful day in 2016, they might have made the choice expected of them. Voters couldn’t possibly have chosen Trump over the sainted Hillary Clinton! They must have been ill-informed, duped by Trump’s lies or other canny operators. Liberals, disoriented by their loss, blamed fake news rather than their own candidates’ failings. (Tellingly, they also made made wild conspiratorial claims that Trump was a puppet for Vladimir Putin, which oddly never received the same level of forensic fact-checking.) Now that the Biden presidency has restored ‘normalcy’ to politics, with the voters in 2020 having diligently ticked the correct box, there is no longer the same urgency to set the record straight, to bombard the public with ‘facts’. Fact-checking has served its purpose.