The great enabling myth of corporate journalism is the just-so story of elite impartiality. While interested political players of all stripes whinge and berate, armed with ideologically vetted talking points, the down-the-middle purveyors of our official civic discourse function as on-the-spot bullshit detectors, unswayed by partisan rancor, moved only by their monkish dedication to factual narrative, letting the political chips fall where they may.

To advertise this solemn set of convictions, the elite press has created the ritualized real-time “fact check” of political speech. These fact-checking franchises are actually recent innovations, stemming from the George W. Bush years, and have nestled firmly into the business models of news organizations desperate to advertise their own objective reliability in an age of rampant polarization and insular, customized information flows. In the hands of the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron, this dogma has billowed out into a demented view of journalists as expert information technicians, dispensing unsullied, carefully varnished accounts of our public life to a deferential and truth-starved public.

In practice, this vision of reporters as above-the-fray priests of a higher empirical truth could not be more ill suited to the Trumpified political age. Indeed, the vision of our political press as a performative fact-checking outlet functions as a kind of learned institutional helplessness. As Trump derides the canons of the Lügenpresse and calls journalists “the enemy of the people,” and MAGA elected officials discuss the lynching of reporters, the whole enterprise of compulsively calling out the movement’s empirical shortcomings is a case study in self-undermining futility. It seems a lot like pointing out that your mugger’s shoe is untied while you’re pinned against the wall with a knife at your throat.

Nevertheless, the fact-checking outfits at major papers serenely carry on as if nothing is amiss in the upper reaches of right-wing power, creating a mock-empirical discourse deeply at odds with the plain dictates of consensual reality. The busybody efforts to fact-check claims coming from the podium at the opening night of the Democratic National Convention furnish an excruciating illustration of the acute limitations of such a deeply impaired model of public empiricism.

Start with this surreal effort from Washington Post national reporter Amy Gardner. Covering President Joe Biden’s speech at the convention last night, Gardner disputed Biden’s claim that “Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election results if he loses again.” Gardner sniffed, “That’s not true. Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”

See, the thing is, for people who actually traffic in plain English, “just” not saying you will honor the results of an election isn’t a meaningful departure from “refusing to accept” said results. That’s especially the case if, oh, let’s say the person issuing these statements has fomented a violent coup to overturn the outcome of the prior legitimate election he lost. The additional claim that the only way his political rivals can win is by cheating doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the quoted speaker is offering a rational assessment of the inner workings of the electoral process.

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Yet this is what the “fact-checking” impulse is reduced to under the Trump regime of overt, self-interested truth-demolition: Because Trump did not use the exact language of Biden’s stump paraphrase, it is somehow Biden who is to be chided. (As it happens, today’s Washington Post features a sound and thorough analysis of how Trump’s rhetoric about the Democratic Party’s ticket switch is laying the groundwork for another attempted MAGA coup, and it contains this sentence: “Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.” But it’s evidently too much to expect the Post’s national reporters to read their own paper.)

Lest you think Gardner’s howler was a slip of just-in-time punditry, the Post’s day-after official fact-check of the convention’s first night abounds with similar dimwitted caviling. Fact-checking columnist Glenn Kessler—a former business editor who’s descended from senior managers of the Royal Dutch Shell and Proctor & Gamble fortunes—calls out California Representative Robert Garcia’s claim that Trump counseled Covid sufferers to inject bleach into their bodies by primly pointing out that in a 2020 Covid press conference, the former president “spoke confusingly of an ‘injection inside’ of lungs of a disinfectant.” See? Not bleach, a disinfectant; not inside your bodies, but maybe just a lung or two. Take that, political stump speaker!

Astoundingly, it gets worse. Citing Hillary Clinton’s speech, Kessler dismisses a line in which Clinton, again referring to Trump’s presidency, said that as president, Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators.” “There is no evidence that Trump sent such letters,” Kessler confidently announces, before nonsensically citing Trump’s own characterization of his correspondence with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as an epistolary exchange that occurred while the two leaders “fell in love.” What’s more, Trump later eagerly shared with Post reporter Bob Woodward a cache of fawning letters he sent to Kim. A Post write-up of that episode notes that Trump had “forged a relationship” with his fellow strongman leader that “he lightheartedly compared to a ‘love’ affair.”

Kessler then digs into a news report quoted in a DNC convention video, which has Trump saying in reply to a reporter’s question about abortion bans that under any such policy, there “has to be some form of punishment for the woman. Yeah, there has to be some form.” Here Kessler again relies on the authority of the deeply mendacious source in question; the video had featured Trump’s quote just after reports of a Texas woman being denied access to a medical abortion after her water broke, who nearly died. For Kessler, that’s evidently an empirical outrage: “The juxtaposition might leave the impression that Trump still believes this. But he walked back the statement the same day he made it in a town hall.” To use Kessler’s own preferred jargon of authenticity, there’s no evidence here that Trump no longer holds this belief—just that his advisers realized that saying it out loud was a political liability, and that for political expediency, he had to appear to disown it. That’s what “walking back” actually means—and lest there be any additional confusion on this score, Trump himself, in the now-infamous June debate with Biden, acknowledged that he would give elastic accounts of his abortion positions because “you have to get elected also.”

On it goes. Does Kessler offer a mealy-mouthed account of Trump’s depiction of the hard-right protesters at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville? Does he ever, under the power-osculating subhead “Trump’s meaning is in dispute.” Does Kessler supply a tortured rationale to dispute a convention speaker’s claim that Trump has sought to cut Social Security and Medicare? Yes, and how. Did Trump actually try to cut Social Security and Medicare? Yes, and yes.

You’ll note that, in reference to this slipshod exercise in phony centrist oversight, I’ve put “fact-checking” in scare quotes—a stylistic practice I otherwise abhor. That’s because actual fact-checking, as undertaken at this magazine and others, is a vocation I revere—I began my journalistic career as a fact-checker at Mother Jones, and know from that apprenticeship that weighing the truth value of published claims is a demanding, nuanced, and essential discipline. But the inert “gotcha” outpourings from the Glenn Kesslers and Amy Gardners of the world are a bathetic parody of such work. They treat the utterances of power as supreme uncontested authority, while haughtily dismissing the context in which power thrives and manufactures its own self-serving rationales as mere political noise. Trump and his enablers have cynically exploited this discursive know-nothingism to their own maximum advantage, and it says everything about the formalist vacuity of the mainstream press’s “fact-checking” concessions that our self-appointed arbiters of facticity are still unable to recognize this basic truth nine years later.