Front Burner - How Canadian reporter Daniel Dale fact-checks Trump

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale tries to fact check everything U.S President Donald Trump says. It keeps him working at all hours and his reporting has drawn attention all over the world. Dale talks about how he builds his database of false claims, which is up to 4,210 as of today, and why he believes pointing out Trump's dishonesty is crucial journalism.

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about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Everybody knows that walls work. You look at different places, they put up a wall, no problem. You look at San Antonio, you look at so many different places. They go from one of the most unsafe cities in the country to one of the safest cities immediately.

That's U.S. President Donald Trump defending his border wall, the one he just caved on to get the government reopened. And in fact, San Antonio doesn't even have a border wall. It's actually 150 miles from the border. Here he is again, later that same day. Unemployment is the best it's been in more than 50 years. That's not true. It's the lowest it's been in 18 years, not 50. And again, on the same day.

However, the whole concept of having lengthy trials for anyone who sets one foot in our country unlawfully must be changed by Congress. Also incorrect. Unauthorized immigrants, they can go through a system of rapid deportation without seeing a judge. These recent fact checks of Trump come from a database built by the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale. Daniel tries to fact check everything Trump says. It's a huge task, one that keeps him up all hours of the night and working on weekends. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Daniel has played a pivotal role in making Trump's dishonesty a central tenet of his presidency. Today, I'm talking to Daniel about how he does his work,

and frankly, why he keeps doing it. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Daniel. Hi, Jamie. Thank you so much for coming today. Thanks for having me on. So we're going to talk about the way you do your work today, because it occurred to me that I actually have so many logistical questions for you. And I should point out that we know each other. We're friends. We worked at the Toronto Star for many years. We also play on the same baseball team together.

watching you work the last couple of years in the U.S. is that this really started for you here in Toronto at City Hall when you were fact-checking the Fords. Yeah, that was the first time I did it. You know, I never sought out to be a fact-checker and I've never been a full-time fact-checker. You know, that's not what I'm paid to do really. But it started during, I believe, the 2014 Toronto mayoral election. Yeah, I remember you were running this campaign lie detector. Yeah, that was the original incarnation. And it started because we had basically a three major candidate race with Rob Ford, John Tory, and Olivia Chow. And then Rob Ford dropped out because of his illness. And then we had Doug Ford, John Tory, and Olivia Chow. And in pretty much every debate, we'd have Ford making like 15 plus, sometimes 20 plus false claims. We'll move on to Mr. Rob Ford.

They want to have a sales tax. They have both said it. There is no difference between John and Olivia on transit. They want LRTs. And John Tory and Olivia Chow being pretty honest, like making one or two or three. And I thought that this disparity in their level of dishonesty was a story in itself. And also that people needed to know the facts.

You know, if they're watching the debate on TV or maybe they were there, they needed to know what was true and not. And so I invented this thing we called Campaign Lie Detector where I just outlined, you know, everything they said that was false. And I thought I was done with that, you know, when I went to Washington. And then it turns out I wasn't. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, because I went back and I was looking at some of the campaign lies that you were fact-checking at the time. So here's one for friends.

There has not been one strike with Labour since I have been mayor. You remember, I said there was not going to be garbage strikes and transit strikes. Friends, there has not been one strike with labor since I've been mayor, and there will not be for the next four years. And you fact-check that, that the city's library workers went on strike for 11 days in 2012. Right. I don't even, I forgot about the library strike. This is so long ago now. But yes, and some of them... A 2012 library strike. Look at how far we've come. We have come sort of far. But I mean, the thing that strikes me now is that what the Trump lies and

what many of the Ford lies have in common is that they're so easy to fact check. Often this is one Google search or something that everyone simply knows. So I've been dealing with, you know, less than the most sophisticated liars over this period. Why do you think that is? Why do you think these are such easy lies? Well, it's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to get into the brains of any politician, maybe especially these sort of very complicated figures. I think to some extent, it's that the Fords and Trump know that no matter how brazen their lies are, they have a base so devoted that they'll believe it. And part of that, I think, is that in both cases,

their bases would not be consuming or trusting the media that would be doing the fact-checking. When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it. I will do whatever I can that they don't get away with it. They have their own agenda, And their agenda is not... I would also be remiss to not ask you this because we have you here. Last week, obviously, we saw the end of this epic 35-day government shutdown. For now, I know the government has three weeks of funding right now. What do you think finally did it? Why did Trump decide to open the government? The government has three weeks of funding right now. What do you think finally did it?

Why did Trump decide to open the government? I think things had just gotten very bad for him over the previous 48 hours. And I had written a piece saying that those 48 hours were the worst of the shutdown for him. You had a cascade of poll numbers coming out showing that he was being punished for the shutdown and he was being blamed for it much more than Democrats. According to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53% say Trump and the Republican Party are at fault compared to only 29% who blame the Democrats. And then I think a big factor was they held these competing votes

in the U.S. Senate on his proposal and the Democrats' proposal, and his proposal, which included wall funding, got fewer votes from the Senate than the Democrats' proposal, which did not include wall funding, even though the Senate is controlled by Republicans. In this case, these six Republicans did vote for Trump's plan, but they also voted for a Democratic plan, which signals that they are not on board with what the president is demanding out of this debate. So I think that was likely a sort of wake up call to the president that, you know, he realized he had lost the support of his own party. Yeah,

at least some of it, you know, his party was not entirely holding firm. And I think that that told the White House, you know, and especially him that his position was not very strong. I know, during the shutdown, there was a lot of rhetoric around the shutdown itself, but also the border wall and immigration. And you were doing a lot of fact checking during that time. What was the most glaring falsehood you've seen Trump say during that time? There were just so many. Maybe the worst one was his claim that there were, quote, unknown Middle Easterners in this migrant caravan during the election. And I spoke to him literally last night. I spoke to another one this morning.

Very good relationship with Border Patrol and ICE. And they say it happens all the time from the Middle East. Even he later admitted there was no proof. I thought that was especially egregious because he was trying to foment fear of Muslims or other brown people, Middle Eastern brown people, to augment the fear he was trying to foment of Latino brown people. And so sort of a double whammy of the use of racial or ethnic prejudice. So logistically, you hear that claim. How do you go about trying to fact check that? The claims like that can be the most difficult to fact check because it's hard to prove a negative.

Most politicians, you know, they're spinning, they're exaggerating. So you have sort of a truth baseline to work with. And then you can say, here's how they're wrong. Here's how they deviate from the truth. When Trump says something dramatic that may be entirely invented, you know, it's hard to prove for a fact that there was not one Middle Easterner there. I've sort of lowered my bar for declaring such things false, because there's so many of these that are invented. So I've come to the position that if we do our due diligence, like, you know, I contacted reporters who were with the caravan who said they didn't see any Middle Easterners, you contact the Department of Homeland Security,

which provides no proof, not even a response to substantiate this claim. In such a case, I might say, you know, there's no evidence, we're going to call this false at the time. And if any evidence emerges to support his claim, then I'll remove it from my false claims list, and I'll provide an update. I know you call some things lies and some things false. So what would you call that? I would call that a lie because it's something he simply conjured up with no apparent basis. There are other times, you know, when he's talking about health policy, for example, well, basically any type of policy.

Because Obamacare is too expensive, the premiums are way too high, and the deductibles don't exist. I mean, the deductibles, you can't even use it. The deductible's so high, unless you get hit by a tractor. It's often unclear if he's simply confused or he doesn't understand the subject very well. But there are many cases

where he simply invented something where there's no factual basis whatsoever. And so it is subjective. You know, I'm sort of the boss of my own fact check and I decide what to call it. And I understand people might quibble in some cases. But I'm pretty confident that, you know, at this point in watching him, I can accurately declare, you know, when he's just making something up. Do you ever go back and forth on it? Have you ever changed your mind? Yeah, well, I go back and forth in the moment before I make the declaration. My argument has been throughout this whole process that I think the vocabulary debate is very important. I

understand why people want lies called lies. But what's more important is simply that the dishonesty is noted and the facts provided. I think the biggest problem with much of the U.S. media throughout this period is not that they're not using the word lie, but that many of the false claims are not being pointed out at all. You know, they're not being called lies. They're not even being called false claims. They're simply being allowed to slip through the cracks, you know, not be talked about. And now for the first time, wages are going up. We pass Veterans Choice, giving our veterans the

right to see a private doctor. San Diego, they're demanding the wall. They want the wall. And Democrats want to totally open the borders. Unvetted illegal aliens trying to flood into our country, overwhelming your schools, depleting your resources. I want to get a sense of how your day works. I want to get a sense of how your day works. Like, how do you figure out all of the things that the president says for you to fact check? So I do a lot of the fact checking on the weekend because you just can't do it during the week while doing the rest of your job. Right, you're writing tons of analysis pieces as well. Yeah, it's not my job to be a full-time fact checker. So basically what I try to do is whenever he has a big speech,

I try to fact check in real time. And so as close as I can to instantaneously point out that what he's saying isn't true, if it isn't. In many cases, though, I can't do that right away because it requires research, of course. So what I do is I go through all of the transcripts, every single thing he said that week, go through his entire Twitter feed, so everything he's tweeted, make a list of everything that I know isn't true or may not be true. You know, I don't know if our

fact is true. And so, you know, I take a claim, like on Twitter today, he said there are 25 million illegal aliens in the country. Okay, so, you know, what does the rest of the government say? What do other experts say? Where might he have gotten that information? So do I have to contact the White House? Do I have to contact the Department of Homeland Security? All the things that journalists do on a daily basis, talk to experts, you know, Google, look in databases, go back to various kinds of sources. I'm doing all of that to try to determine whether what he said is true or not. And then is this organized for you on an Excel spreadsheet? Or are you like color coding this? I guess I'm just trying to figure out how you

keep track because it's just the volume is getting to be so large, right? The volume is horrible. It's gotten to be such an unpleasant task, honestly, to do the weekly list of false claims. And I can't complain much about it. Like our colleagues, you know, are in war zones reporting on disasters. Sitting in my pajamas and fact checking the president is not the most arduous task. But just as a factual matter, it's just so time consuming because there are so many. But I do have a spreadsheet. It's a Google Docs spreadsheet, basically like Excel. And it just contains all the false claims that he's made in the past.

So that allows us to quickly tell people how many times he said something. And I think people value that context also. It's really remarkable when you think about what you've built here. It's essentially a massive database that can be sorted. That allows us to tell people what categories he's making the false claims about. You know, how many is he making about immigration? How many are about Canada, about trade, about North Korea? And so, yeah, that lets us look at trends.

So one trend we established is the dramatic increase in immigration-related false claims over the past year. So in his first year in office, 2017, and the early part of 2018, he made, I believe it was 88. It was under 90 false claims about immigration. Still a lot, but it was the seventh most of any category. Under past administrations, the border didn't go down, it went up. In his second year in office, so 2018

and the early part of 2019, it was more than 550 false claims about immigration, number one on the list. When I say Mexico's going to pay for the wall, do you think they're going to write a check for $20 billion or $10 billion or $5 billion or $0.02? No, they're paying for the wall in a great trade deal. And so you can see how his lying is evolving over time, which I think is useful. You mentioned before talking about fact-checking in real time. Do you ever get stuff wrong? Like, what's an example of something you've gotten wrong and have had to correct yourself?

So at one point, Trump said that, I saw a tweet saying that Trump had said the U.S. is the cleanest. Right now we're at the cleanest. And he'd previously said that the U.S. is the cleanest country in the world environmentally. There's actually, you know, quite scientific rankings on this and the U.S. is not the cleanest. So I assumed he was saying the same thing he used to be saying. And I said, you know, Trump is wrong again. He got this, you know, the U.S. ranks 10th by this measure, 27th by this measure. You know, I hadn't watched the full video that had been alluded to in another tweet, which is always a mistake. You always got to watch it before you say someone's wrong. And it turned out that Trump had said that the U.S. is the cleanest it's ever been.

Right now we're at the cleanest we've ever been. And that's very important to me. Which by some measures it is. And so, you know, in that case, I deleted it. I said, my apology is my fault, whatever. You know, I didn't watch the video and I messed this up. It's really important for people like me who are holding ourselves out as sort of arbiters of truth that when we do mess up, we own up to it because I think, you know, without that, we lose our credibility. What's the hardest time you've had fact-checking something?

I think two kinds of things are the hardest to fact-check. One are when we have to try to prove a negative, you know, prove that something that he said that seems very implausible is definitively untrue. And often I can't. The other things that are hardest to fact check are when he goes down some weird, obscure rabbit hole. At one point, he started claiming that people in the former Czechoslovakia loved the United States so much that they would tape dollar bills, U.S. dollar bills to their windshields and drive around. People used to take single dollar bills,

and they used to paint them and paste them onto the windshield of their car because it represented America. That's all coming back now. That's what's happening. Made in the USA, made in America. We're proud of it again. And so, you know, for stuff like that, I ended up contacting experts in Czech history, some of whom were Czech, thinking, you know, I'd probably not be able to definitively fact check this. But these people were adamant, like, that would be insane in communist Czechoslovakia. You could get arrested for displaying hard currency. No one no one would do that. And so.

So is that on your false claims list? That's on the false claims list. And I'll acknowledge in cases like that, you know, I can't be certain that this didn't happen once. But experts say, you know, it's exceptionally unlikely. And here's why. Some of this stuff feels a little silly, right? The things that he lies about. Yes. Why do you want to fact check everything? You know, why not just fact check the big dangerous stuff and just leave this

other stuff to the side? I think it's a very good question and something I've thought about. I think that the people that we're most skeptical of are people who lie about nothing, like for no reason. People who are habitually, habitually dishonest. I think the same goes for the president. I think when he is when he is making things up about minor subjects, where he's not on the defensive, it's not a scandal or controversy. He's just lying to people. I think that tells us something about his character. And I think it also tells us something about the more important lies. The other thing is that I think simply tracking the quantity is useful. Being able to categorize them comprehensively is useful.

I think this is an important story of the Trump presidency, the dishonesty. And so I think as comprehensive as we can be about them, even if sometimes we seem pedantic or silly, that's helpful. that's helpful. Sometimes I feel like I've created a monster in setting out to make a comprehensive list of every false claim. To some extent, it's the bane of my existence, and certainly on weekends it's the bane of my existence when I just want to be sleeping or enjoying the sunshine or whatever. So what is it then that keeps you going? Why do you do it? Well, part of it is that, you know, I said I was going to do it, so I got to do it. Part of it is that I think a lot of people do value it. And part of it is that I think it's a matter of principle

for me that our role as journalists is to hold powerful people accountable and to bring facts and truth to people. And my case to other journalists has been we can't get tired out by his relentlessness with lying. If he just outlasts us, then eventually, you know, he'll just be saying untrue things and no one will be pointing them out because we've decided that, you know, we want to sleep. And so I've tried to set a kind of example here that let's be just as relentless, just as persistent as he is. Daniel, thank you so much for coming by today and for this really interesting conversation.

I learned a ton. Thank you very much, Amy. At the time we recorded this podcast, Daniel had added 4,210 false statements by President Trump to his growing list. We'll tweet out a link to Daniel's ongoing project. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down.

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