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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is the process for checking campaign promises for the MAGA-Meter, and does it differ from your previous trackers?
Jacobson: The way our system works is, these are all promises that were things said, or tweeted, or whatever by the president during the campaign. For instance, there's a bunch of things [Trump's] acted on that he never said during the campaign, and so those are not in our campaign promises. Anything about the Panama Canal, anything about Greenland, anything about Canada, the Canadian tariffs, the Mexican tariffs, these are all things that he first started talking about after he was elected.
Our consistent methodology has been that we look at what the president — or the candidate then — puts forward as the agenda while he or she is the candidate. What we’re looking at is: What they told the voters they were going to do, and what they ended up doing. If they make promises after they're elected, that's a different story, and we don't track that. We might cover it as a news story, of course, but we wouldn't track it as one of the official promises. We don’t keep adding promises into our database after they’ve won the election.
As disinformation continues to spread, the role of journalists and fact checkers is more important than ever. How is the MAGA-Meter filling this need?
Jacobson: We have always seen this as part of our overarching mission, which is kind of twofold. First, the fact checks. The idea is to provide voters with information about whether their politicians are saying things that are accurate or not. Our standard for a claim that we want to check is something along the lines of, if you hear something or see something in the media that a politician is saying, you think to yourself, “Huh, I wonder if that's true.”
And then dovetailing with that, is more on the promises side. We want to provide accountability journalism, and so that's why we focused on the campaign promises that they made before the voters voted. Those are what they said they were going to do. Our promise updates are value neutral in that we don't say whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. All we're doing is tracking what they did after they said they would do something.
There are five ratings that we give: “Promise Kept,” “Promise Broken,” and then there’s “Compromise”; those are our three final ratings. Everything at the end of a president's term gets sorted into one of those three. In the interim, for the four years or the eight years that they're in office, there are ratings “In the Works” or “Stalled.” Our job with Biden in the past few weeks before the inauguration, was to move all the ones that were in the “In the Works” category or the “Stalled” category to one of the final three ratings.
How do you know what to follow up on?
Jacobson: From our perspective as a fact checking organization, we always are looking for checkable claims that we can rate for their truth accuracy. That's not always possible. Sometimes Trump — or any politician — will say things that are opinions, and we can't fact check opinions. They'll say things that are predictions. They'll say things that aren't verifiable, or at least easily verifiable, because there's no independent arbiter out there.
You sometimes have to just figure out, okay, the stuff you said is really interesting; but from our perspective as a fact-check organization, there are some things that are really in our wheelhouse that we need to fact check, and some things that are better left to other media outlets because they're not focused on fact checking and don't have to fit within that mold.
What are some helpful fact-checking resources you recommend for journalists?
Jacobson: If it's not too self-serving, check us out, and our competitors. If you're wondering about something, we may not have fact checked it, but there's a chance that we did. Google the topic and the term “fact check” and our coverage should come up, as well as other fact checkers like FactCheck.org, Washington Post Fact Checker, New York Times Fact Check, and some of the wire services [for example: AFP Fact Check, AP Fact Check, Reuters Fact Check].
We take this work seriously, and we do a lot of digging into the databases, the documents, the transcripts, and videotaped evidence. And we do reporting with experts who know something about the field. We give all of the evidence and provide a source list at the end of each article, as well as links to the documents and databases so that you can do your own digging.
There's a lot of data out there that I use all the time at the FRED website, [Federal Reserve Economic Data]. It's got all kinds of data from various federal agencies, a lot of employment economic data, but also other types of data. I hope that continues to stay online as other websites are being taken down. But that's a huge one for me.
I do a lot of charts. In the past couple of years, even before I start doing any reporting, I'll just download the data into a chart and then use that to share with my sources. But also it helps me conceptualize things. And when we go back to a speaker who says something, and I can show the data, and here's the link to the data, you can do it yourself. It can really be a helpful visualization as part of your reporting.
What advice would you give an emerging accountability journalist covering a president for the first time?
Jacobson: I don't want to be too light hearted about this, but Trump says a lot. There is a firehose of claims and information that are coming out, and there's no possible way to cover it all. Keep your expectations in check. Because for this president — not necessarily for all presidents — but for this one, it appears that he's going to be saying a lot of things, and it's going to be hard to keep up with him.
Learn more: Jacobson shares the biggest surprises from covering the promises of multiple administrations
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