There seems to be a paradox in modern politics. Every election the technology for fact checking grows faster and easier, and yet it seems as if it also becomes easier for politicians to get away with lying. My suspicion is that this is because we've lost the mainstream media as the arbiter of truth.
Back in the day, it was the responsibility of the media to hold politicians accountable for their actions. This required investigative journalism, which was very expensive, but it was an investment that paid off. Major scoops, like Woodward and Bernstein's work on Watergate, was what differentiated newspapers and drew readers from the competition.
But two things changed that.
First, political operatives discovered that if they couldn't counter the message of a story, they could still attack the messenger. Accusations of bias became an effective technique for derailing any story.
Second, the advent of the internet fragmented the media market. Investigative journalism lost its status as the primary draw to news outlets, while remaining just as expensive.
Now that it had become both dangerous and unprofitable, mainstream news sources abandoned investigative journalism in favor of parrot journalism. In the new paradigm, the news would simply repeat what other people said. Instead of investigating a quote, the media would simply "balance" it with a quote from someone else who disagreed. Since the media never made a judgment for themselves, they were off the hook for accusations of bias, and they could save the money they would have spent on investigating.
Unfortunately, this new paradigm required the media to base its reporting on a fundamentally false premise: that being unbiased and remaining neutral are equivalent.
The premise holds true for matters of opinion. When two politicians disagree on values or political philosophy, it is appropriate for the media to demonstrate lack of bias by remaining neutral.
However, in matters of fact, neutrality becomes a form of bias. When two politicians disagree on a fact, there are only two possible explanations: either one is right and one is wrong, or both are wrong. Whatever the explanation, to remain neutral the media must portray both politicians as being equivalent. But if one of them is right and the other is wrong, the media can only accomplish this by pulling down whoever is right and lifting up whoever is wrong. In effect, the media is showing bias towards whoever is wrong.
The unintended consequences of playing it safe is the we have created a media that is not biased towards the left or the right, but is instead biased towards falsehood. In the process, they have made lying a viable political tool.
