When President Obama and Mitt Romney face off Wednesday night in the first presidential debate, The New York Times’s newsroom will be ready with a small army of reporters and editors – and with a spreadsheet of 76 pre-written fact-checking reports – to counter the candidates’ efforts to embellish or misinform.
The idea is to do that fact-checking aggressively and in real time, on a live blog, editors told me.
Later, in the Thursday print edition, readers will also see the results of this effort as part of the debate coverage.
I raised the question to editors on Tuesday afternoon because the subject of fact-checking has been very much on the public’s mind and very much in the news. What’s more, the news media have been much criticized for not effectively getting to the bottom of the candidates’ claims and counterclaims during this contentious campaign.
Richard L. Berke, an assistant managing editor who oversees The Times’s politics coverage, calls this advance effort “the most ambitious fact-checking we’ve ever done.”
Mary Suh, a deputy politics editor, has a team of 20 reporters who have worked on the effort and who will be present to respond to what comes up during the debate. Michael Cooper will play a leading role among those reporters, she said. Many of the fact-checking reports will be accompanied by graphics. In other instances, the graphics will stand alone.
“We’re writing these fact-checks in advance so that we’re not scrambling,” Ms. Suh said. “It’s all on an Excel spreadsheet – from Romney’s Bain history to Obama’s record on the deficit.”
The Times, both editors noted, has always done this kind of work. But it has taken on a new urgency.
Members of the public are demanding that news organizations do more to get at the truth. And they are right to do so.
There’s no more important role for the news media in this campaign. It will be interesting to see how well it plays out.
More on this subject from The Times and around the Web:
The former Times national political correspondent Adam Clymer wrote this week about how the debate will most likely stretch the truth in many directions, putting it in historical context.
And here, from around the Web, is more from other news organizations and from campaign strategists:
How CNN is planning to fact-check.
How PolitiFact, based at The Tampa Bay Times, is doing it.
How Mr. Romney plans to play the fact-checking role himself.