“Not true, Governor Romney.”

President Barack Obama, widely considered to have lost his first debate against Mitt Romney thirteen days previously, was eager to defend his record. But Romney, having returned to familiar territory, was unwilling to concede the point.

“In the last four years,” Romney had said, “you cut permits and licenses on federal land and federal waters in half.” Unsatisfied with Obama’s denial of this point, Romney kept pressing.

“So how much did you cut them by?”

“It’s not true,” Obama said again.

“How much did you cut them by, then?”

“Governor, we have actually produced more oil on—”

“No, no, how much—”

The crossfire eventually yielded to a brief substantive exchange on the president’s energy policies before the debate continued on to other topics. Within a few hours, all the major outlets—the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN—were ready with “fact checks” assessing the validity of both candidates’ claims. (The verdict was mixed.)

Nothing about this exchange or the media coverage it generated will strike the reader as out of the ordinary—aside perhaps from the fact that the 2012 contest could still feature such arcane policy debates, unlike what passes for political debate today. The ritual of fact-checking politicians’ statements is now so routine as to be hardly worth pointing out. But political fact-checking wasn’t always so commonplace. Even in 2012, it was still such a new and burgeoning subgenre of journalism that it was the subject of its own coverage and commentary.

Continue reading at The New Atlantis.