Fact-Checking Alone Cannot Protect Democracy | The Nation

For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I gave at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/anti-system. Liberals have tried to fight anti-system politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on fact-checking.

But I maintain that this strategy is deeply flawed, since voters who respond to anti-system arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with anti-system anger in a more productive way.