Journalist John Dickerson discussed the difficulty in deciding when to confront a political candidate for misstating facts, in an interverview with “Examining Poltics.”
The host of CBS’ “Face the Nation,” discussing his new book, Whistlestop; My Favorite Stories From Campaign History, with the Washington Examiner’s podcast, said that this cycle has been particulary challenging in dealing with candidates that offer a view of events that are in plain contradition to what happened.
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It has gone beyond the sort of acceptable spin that journalists are accustomed to dealing with when interviewing candidates for office.
“You have to make a decision with each guest and each show. But obviously you don’t want your show to be a platform for untrue things,” Dickerson said. “Sometimes candidates are — so hoping that you will call them on their factual inaccuracy because the three or four or five minute additional conversation that you will have about that issue is one in which they will get to continue to either, A) assert their inaccuracy and get the political benefit of doing that, or B) they’ll be happy to take the hit on factual accuracy if you’re spending seven minutes on their topic, because a lot of politics is issue control, not whether I’m right or wrong.”
“I think a good example of that is whether [President] Obama was the founder of [the Islamic State]. Turns out he wasn’t not the founder of ISIS,” Dickerson added. “I think Donald Trump did a great job of making that hyperbolic statement, which is within the bounds of political hyperbole… Every minute you fact-checked whether Barack Obama was truly the founder of ISIS, was another minute the people heard, ‘Obama, founder, ISIS.'”
