Journalists are fact-checking the Democratic National Convention. Here’s what they’ve found

In the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention, there were plenty of examples of a double standard in how Republicans and Democrats were presented by the media, perhaps most egregiously CBS’s social media posts about the presidential candidates’ plan to eliminate taxes on tips.
One of those things was not like the other, many people pointed out on X.
Time magazine’s flattering portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris also drew conservatives’ ire, coming so soon after the magazine chose not to use in print the now iconic photo of former President Donald Trump holding his fist in the air after the assassination attempt. And coverage of the Democratic National Convention this week — in particular the speeches by Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama — has been friendly and warm. (”With humor and hope, Obamas warn against Trump,” NPR’s headline said; the Los Angeles Times gave us “Handing off the mantle of hope.”)
But there is fact-checking going on as the Democrats meet in Chicago, although you might not see it on the front page.
As they did during the Republican National Convention in July, several news organizations are looking skeptically at some of the speakers’ more dubious statements, and challenging some of the claims, even when doing so benefits Trump. Here are a few of the statements that fact-checkers have debunked this week.
On the website FactCheck.org, a project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center, a team of four fact-checkers, concluded “Several claims by (President Joe) Biden, and some from other Democrats at the Chicago convention, missed the mark.”
Among them: Sen. Dick Durbin saying that millions of jobs had been lost during the Trump administration without noting that the pandemic was the reason and Biden saying that Trump “will do everything to ban abortion nationwide,” although Trump has said he would not sign a national abortion ban. Similarly, Durbin said in his speech that in vitro fertilization would end in “Trump’s America” although Trump has said he supports the availability of IVF.
The FactCheck.org report also noted, “Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez said Trump is ‘threatening to slash Medicare,’ while Biden claimed that Trump wants to cut Medicare and Social Security. But Trump has consistently said he will not cut either program.”
The report challenged Biden’s claim that his administration was responsible for a decline in the murder rate, saying, “Experts say presidents have little to do with the changes in murder or violent crime while they are in office,” and said that the president’s “boasts” about lowering inflation were misleading: “Growth in inflation has been steadily declining from its peak of 9.1% for the 12 months ending in June 2022, but overall, it is still up 19.4% since the start of Biden’s presidency.”
And the fact-checkers also provided important context for Trump’s infamous “bloodbath” comment — he was talking figuratively about economic consequences if Biden were to have been reelected — and his joke about being a “dictator” in a second administration, acknowledging that Trump had said he wouldn’t be a dictator — “except for Day 1″ when he pledged to close the southern border and expand oil drilling.
Over at PolitiFact, a fact-checking website that’s part of the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a report examined the veracity of claims made on the second night of the convention by Barack and Michelle Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, among others.
The report rightly noted that the Obamas “energized convention attendees” (although to be fair, so did the oldest and youngest delegates from West Virginia when casting their votes).
But then PolitiFact rated as “half true” Barack Obama’s claim that the Biden administration has produced “15 million jobs, higher wages, lower health care costs,” noting that some of those jobs were restored as the pandemic subsided, and that over the course of the administration, wages have lagged behind inflation, though they have outpaced inflation in the past two years.
“Whether health care costs were lower overall is a trickier question, because there’s great variation from family to family and person to person. However, U.S. health care expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product peaked during the pandemic in 2020 and have since fallen roughly to prepandemic levels. This represented the biggest sustained decline in decades,” the PolitiFact report said.
The fact-checkers awarded a “mostly false” rating to Sanders’ claim that “unemployment was soaring” when Biden took office, noting, “In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate surged to 14.8% as millions of Americans lost their jobs. But by the time Biden took office in January 2021, the rate had fallen to 6.4%, and it continued to fall that year.”
When FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show earlier this month, the pair had an exchange about the fairness of the media, in which Silver said there are a lot of journalists, “the majority even maybe,” who care about the truth and who are able to separate their own personal interests from their journalism. Kelly scoffed, saying, “That’s insane.”
“I’m not going to deny there are some, but the majority, absolutely not. Look at the news coverage,” Kelly said. As an example, she cited the coverage of Trump’s two-hour conversation with Elon Musk on the social media platform X.
She has a point: Politico called that conversation a “catastrophe,” Reuters said Trump rambled and sounded like he had a lisp. That same Reuters article also said that Musk didn’t challenge Trump’s claims about immigrants and the price of bacon.
But Musk, despite his foray into citizen journalism, had no professional or ethical mandate to ferret out truth in conversation with the man he has enthusiastically endorsed for president. Journalists do. And fact-checking websites like Factcheck.org and PolitiFact — as well as other operations run by news organizations including the BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters and The Associated Press — offer at least context for press skeptics.
It remains to be seen, however, how rigorous the fact-checking will be during Harris’s acceptance speech Thursday night.