Katie Sanders is editor-in-chief of Poynter’s PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others.
So, of course, she will be watching tonight’s big presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. But she will have to be up at 3 a.m. to do it.
That’s because this debate coverage is a bit different for PolitiFact. Sanders and others from the PolitiFact and Poynter staff are at the 11th annual GlobalFact conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But even halfway around the world, Sanders is leading up the effort to cover one of the most important presidential debates in our lifetime, and one that surely will have fact-checkers furiously working to dig into the claims of the two candidates.
And, it should be mentioned, this debate is a bit different, too. There will be no live audience. Microphones will supposedly be cut off if the candidates get unruly. And it’s June — nearly five months before the election and before either party has had their national convention.
On Wednesday, Sanders and I exchanged several messages over Slack and email. Here’s a portion of our conversation about how PolitiFact will handle tonight’s debate.
Tom Jones: What is PolitiFact’s plan for covering tonight’s debate? How many people will be covering it and what do you have in store for your audience?
Katie Sanders: The overall plan is ambitious and involves 27 people — that’s definitely a record. That’s the PolitiFact staff plus two more people joining from KFF Health News to help us cover health-related claims. We will cover the debate in several formats and two languages, adding in Spanish.
For the political junkies, we will offer real-time fact-checking as the debate goes on on a politifact.com live blog. We will outline a comprehensive story outlining the most significant claims of the night. That is probably the biggest and most involved endeavor. We expect the story to cover a lot of ground; in 2020 it had more than 30 claims following one debate. This is great for anybody who wants to wake up and filter out the spin while learning about what was discussed.
PolitiFact en Español, a team of four people, will focus on producing a story in Spanish and recording videos to distribute across social media channels with key claims, including our growing WhatsApp channel.
We’re excited about the partnerships we’ve established to distribute this coverage. We have local and national TV, digital and print partners who will carry this coverage in one way or another either through running our story or doing interviews with our team through Friday. We’re blogging with ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, and are working with PBS digital, too.
Jones: Having a debate in June is unusual. We’ve never had one this early and it came together very quickly. How long have you been able to prepare and what has that preparation looked like?
Sanders: A June debate was definitely not in the cards when we were outlining the cadence of the year. The debate was announced shortly before we held a team retreat in Washington, D.C., where we were brainstorming how we could reimagine our debate coverage from previous cycles. That dominated the conversation and gave everyone a clear idea of what to work on in the weeks ahead. It’s no surprise to anyone who’s been on our website lately; we have been trying to rate as many Trump and Biden claims as possible that we think may come up.
Just to get into the nitty-gritty, everyone has a specific job that they’re being asked to do before the debate, during the debate and after the debate. We’ve had several meetings to go over who is responsible for what.
Jones: Finally, with both candidates answering questions and reeling off a bunch of claims quickly, how can you possibly fact-check in real time?
Sanders: It can be overwhelming to fact-check in real time, I’m not going to lie. Especially with these two candidates, they are going to be feisty. But the secret that is not really a secret is that politicians like to repeat themselves when they get on the big stage. Our experience from covering Republican primary debates last fall and dozens of presidential primary and general debates over the years is that they will bring up some claims we have fact-checked before. So it is not magic. Doing this “live” is built on a foundation of intensive research and interviews with subject matter experts that can take days, per claim.
My thanks to Katie Sanders, and now on with more debate and media news …
The New York Times shared its plans for tonight’s debate, writing that “60 Times journalists will be on hand Thursday night to offer context, insight, photos, reactions and fact-checking.” That included 29 reporters who will be fact-checking the candidates.
Meanwhile, look for fact-checking from most national news outlets. That includes CBS, where Major Garrett will fact-check the debate under the CBS News Confirmed banner. CBS News launched the CBS News Confirmed unit late last year and it will eventually include a show on CBS News’ streaming network.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Rodney Ho reports that CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have been in Atlanta since Sunday, rehearsing for tonight’s debate. In addition, CNN boss Mark Thompson is in Atlanta to oversee the debate.
Ho writes that the network is prepped for various technical issues.
Alexa Bennewitz, CNN’s special director of special events, told Ho, “We have redundancies across the board. Cameras. Microphones. The smallest details. We have a backup generator. And we have three flavors of transmission: fiber, internet and satellite.”
We’ve been writing about it all week. How much pressure will be on CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash? The Trump campaign already has laid plenty of groundwork that the debate is going to be biased against their candidate, constantly and consistently alleging that Bash and, especially, Tapper are anti-Trump.
Tapper and Bash haven’t done any interviews, but you would guess they are aware of what’s being said, particularly from the Trump side. They are pros, so you can expect they will conduct a fair debate. But might there be, perhaps even subconsciously, moments when they try to dispel any accusations of being pro-Biden by being extra tough with him?
Again, you would like to believe they will shut out any outside noise and run a fair debate.
Deadline’s Ted Johnson wrote, “… they will be under intense scrutiny not just from Trump and the right, but from Biden and others on the left. With the 90-minute runtime, every question asked will leave out ones not asked, displeasing some constituency. Any fact-checks will be weighed against moments where there were none at all.”
Here’s a clip of CNN’s Phil Mattingly giving viewers a preview of how tonight’s debate is scheduled to go. It includes an explanation of how the microphones will work. And, at least based on the clip, it will be rather difficult for a candidate whose microphone is shut off to be heard by the TV audience.
Semafor’s Max Tani writes about several high-profile staffers on the move from Politico, including its popular media writer, Jack Shafer.
Tani reports that Alex Ward, who shared the byline on Politico’s big-time scoop about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, is leaving for The Wall Street Journal along with Pentagon reporter Lara Seligman.
Tani writes that Shafer “confirmed to Semafor that he is also leaving amid the company’s waning interest in media coverage.”
Shafer told Tani, “I had a really good run with a long leash at Politico and appreciate all the great people I worked with. But the job has changed in recent months and I think it’s best for me to hit the ground dancing someplace else where media criticism is important to the mix.”
Sports broadcaster Al Michaels, shown here in 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Here’s something new, very interesting and, well, perhaps a bit troubling. For this summer’s Paris Olympics, NBC’s Peacock is going to use artificial intelligence technology for something called “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock.” It will be a personalized round-up of the previous day’s top moments from the Olympics.
Now here’s where the AI part comes in. The segments will be moderated by legendary announcer Al Michaels. But it won’t actually be Michaels; it will be his voice as generated by AI.
Here’s what it sounds like.
Naturally, Michaels, one of the greatest announcers in sports history, had reservations about the whole deal. He told Tom Kludt in a piece for Vanity Fair that he was “very skeptical.” Then he heard what it would sound like.
Michaels said, “Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing. And it was a little bit frightening. … It was not only close, it was almost 2% off perfect. I’m thinking, ‘Whoa.’”
Kludt wrote, “I heard it for myself in a demonstration provided by NBC last week, and sure enough, it sounded like the real Al Michaels.”
It does to a point. I’ve listened and I think it sounds just the slightest touch off — but maybe that’s because I knew it was AI when I heard it. If I didn’t know, would I have noticed? Maybe not. Actually, probably not if I’m being honest.
Michaels said, “They were able to do exactly what I might — I shouldn’t say ‘exactly,’ it sounded like what I might say in certain situations.”
Kludt wrote, “The feature … will pull from thousands of hours of live coverage from the Games in Paris using a large language model, or an LLM. The model analyzes subtitles and metadata to summarize clips from NBC’s Olympics coverage, and then adapts those summaries to fit Michaels’s signature style. The resulting text is then fed to a voice AI model — based on Michaels’s previous NBC appearances — that was trained to learn the unique pronunciations and intonations of certain words and phrases. In the end, this multilayered process will yield around 10 minutes’ worth of highlights for each user.”
Kludt adds, “NBC says that there could be nearly 7 million personalized variants of the recaps, and that a team of human editors will review the content before it is released to users. (That layer of quality control will be especially important when it comes to the pronunciation of the athletes’ names.)”
John Jelley, senior vice president of product and user experience at Peacock, told Kludt that the scale of the Olympics — more than 300 events over 32 sports — made it the place to try this technology.
The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch wrote, “The recap will be available to Peacock subscribers starting July 27 at www.peacocktv.com/olympics on all supported web browsers as well as on the Peacock app on select mobile and tablet devices. There is a brief set of questions to set up an individual recap based on a consumer’s preferences about the sports they like and highlights they want. (Michaels greets you by name.)”
Jelley told Kludt, “It would be impossible to deliver a personalized experience with a legendary sportscaster to millions of fans without it.”
The whole personalized highlight package is a huge innovation. Still, the AI-generated voice replacing an actual human is making some people squirm.
Awful Announcing’s Joe Lucia wrote, “The idea of personalized recaps is pretty cool. Pick your sports and topics and see daily recaps for what you chose? That’s awesome! Having those personalized highlights narrated by an auto-generated version of Al Michaels? Eh, maybe that’s a step too far, especially when NBC is touting over 150 broadcasters covering the Paris Games for the network.”
One would assume Michaels is being compensated, and that might make using his voice a bit easier to stomach for those who might have issues with all of this.
Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.
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