During this week’s debate in Iowa, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, tirelessly promoted a website to fact-check Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. We took a closer look, and here’s what we found.
- Share full article
Nikki Haley repeatedly directed viewers to a website purporting to fact-check Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “lies” during a debate Wednesday.
More than a dozen times during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, directed viewers to a website purporting to correct what she called Ron DeSantis’s “lies.”
But the Haley campaign’s website is itself a political project — not an exercise in objective fact-checking.
The site does point to independent fact-checking to help push back on claims twisting Ms. Haley’s positions on things like Gaza refugees and to clarify her comments about being motivated to run for office by a speech made by Hillary Clinton, despite their political differences.
But there are key differences between Ms. Haley’s effort and an independent fact-checking operation. The website, for example, doesn’t directly quote Mr. DeSantis or cite the specific comments being rebutted. It also deems a “lie” some statements that don’t actually contain checkable facts.
“Mr. DeSantis claims he will take on the big spenders in Washington,” the site says, calling his claim a lie because while in Congress he voted to increase the federal debt limit. Ms. Haley may well use that line of criticism in her campaign, but that alone doesn’t make Mr. DeSantis’s statements about his intent to rein in federal spending a “lie.”
“Ultimately it’s still campaign propaganda,” said Bill Adair, the creator of the website PolitiFact and a Duke University journalism professor. “It’s not fact-checking.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Source: nytimes.com
