The Review: Expertise, Pedantry, and the Woes of the Fact-Checker

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In the middle of the Trump presidency, [Sam Fallon wrote a widely]( criticizing professors of literature and history for what he called “literalist interventions” — attacks on presidential policy and rhetoric that hinged on a kind of irrelevant pedantry, an exhausting and pointless unfurling of “dull litanies of fact.” The constraints and contortions of the media to which public-facing scholars have recourse might be part of the problem, as Fallon acknowledged: “Twitter’s enforced brevity privileges the factoid,” for instance, and outlets like Vox have “built a brand around a house style that blends earnest righteousness and complacent, self-satisfied wonkery.” What Fallon called “fact-grubbing” became, in the Trump years, a metastasizing genre all its own, a genre whose finale, or tombstone, was the Washington Post “Fact Checker” [article]( headlined “Trump’s False or Misleading Claims Total 30,573 Over 4 Years.” Trump’s compulsive mendacity might have seemed to justify that quantitative approach, though one wonders how Obama, or Bush, or any world leader anywhere, would have fared in a comparable exercise. Paid for and Created by University of Denver [University of Denver Research Addresses Global Challenges]( Learn how University of Denver faculty and students are collaborating with other institutions, community organizations and state agencies to drive positive innovation, leveraging its diverse portfolio of knowledge leaders to create global solutions. Articles like the Post’s were rhetoric, not fact-checking; their purpose was to persuade, not to explain, and at their worst they shaded into propaganda. Trump is out of office now, but, unfortunately, the genre of the motivated fact-check is still around, one more irritating revenant from the Trump years. I was reminded of it recently when a friend, anxious about the Delta variant, texted me in alarm about a CNN “fact check” of President Biden’s statement that “if you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.” “[This is false]( CNN insisted (in decisive red highlighter), I guess because it is not literally impossible to die if you’re vaccinated, merely extremely unlikely. As of this writing, around 99.5 per cent of Covid-19 deaths are [among unvaccinated people](. Accusing Biden of a falsehood is absurd. The point seems to be to justify showy Trump-era fact-checking with a display of even-handedness. But the result merely confirms that pedantic fact-checks were never good journalism. [Read Fallon’s 201](. 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