Oh, For Goodness Sake

Fact-Check Talk Show Guests

I’d given up watching Sunday talk shows, after decades, without much thinking about it, so it wasn’t by decision. I just stopped turning the television on. I stopped thinking of turning it on and I do know why. I was tired of watching the hosts nodding their heads without challenge to any amount of nonsense spouted by their partisan guests.

So I found this simple idea—mentioned by Michael Calderone in Will the Sunday shows ever change?—of fact-checking talk show guests to be an interesting one.

A new idea recently surfaced for television’s longest-running show: What if “Meet the Press” fact-checked what its stream of political guests said and ran the results online later in the week?

The suggestion by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen kicked around Twitter and the blogosphere with such force that the show’s host, David Gregory, said in a statement to POLITICO that it was a “good idea” and his staff is “going to talk about it.”

Rosen also made a terrific point here:

To Rosen, the problem is that “the more partisan environment overtakes the premise of a discussion based on mutually agreed-upon facts.” That’s why he is big on fact checking. But he also argues that producers should “diversify their ideas about balance and mix things up a bit.”

“For example, how about striving for balance between tea party conservatives and establishment conservatives, between blogospheric liberals and congressional liberals?” Rosen asked. “The fact that this doesn’t even occur to them shows how evacuated the political imagination is on Sunday morning.”

Who knows? I might start turning on the television.