Political Debate FACT CHECKED: a media experiment

Without taking sides, it is obvious after watching this video that fact checking is a major issue in politics. Many of us watched this debate, however, how many can say they actually fact checked everything being said?

In 2016, I started becoming more politically active because I was constantly around others speaking or arguing about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I made it a point to make sure I wasn’t just siding with whoever my family sided with. I knew that I had more of a democratic view but I still wanted to look further into each candidate. This led me to actually watch the political debates this past election — which is unusual for me.

While watching the debates I realized I needed to know a lot more about what is happening in the country in order to understand what everyone was talking about. I also had a hard time knowing who was telling the truth and who was just blurting out lies.

I chose to write about this debate because I found it to be problematic. There are so many lies throughout the debate that I cannot imagine every single person watching could distinguish the truth from the lies. How can we better our broadcasting in order to feed truthful news to society? How do lies fed to the public change their perspectives? Would elections turn out differently if fact checks were done during live broadcasting simultaneously ?