@sozobe,
sozobe wrote:And people watching often don't know it's a whopper unless they go ahead and research it the next day on Factcheck.org or Politifact.com or similar.
. . . and even that doesn't necessarily help. Take Politifact. They awarded their "lie of the year 2011" to the Democratic claim that the Ryan plan would end Medicare. And yet, this claim was at worst was a slight spin on the truth. At best, it was nothing
but the truth. Indeed, I'm leaning towards "nothing but the truth" myself.
sozobe wrote:My idea: put together a bipartisan consortium of those kinds of fact-checking organizations and have them keep tabs on the debate as it's happening, with some sort of a whopper chart that would appear onscreen.
I expect that this will work well in a field where all the contestants lie about equally much. But when one contestant lies a lot more than the others, rigorous fact-checking will reveal that, and then that contestant will frame the fact-checker as biased. To avoid the appearance of bias, fact-checkers will play up minor fibs by comparatively honest contestants (Huntsman, Paul, Obama) while playing down the Big Lies of the Big Liars (Romney, Gingrich, Bush). I think that's what Politifact did in their lie-of-the-year-2011 incident. Accordingly, I don't trust fact-checkers to do their work properly in such an environment, and find myself pessimistic about your suggestion. Sorry.