Watching the vice presidential debates last night, it occurred to me that a big problem with the whole format is that we have no way to know if either person is lying or not. If Vice President Cheney says he’s created x jobs this year, how do we know he actually has? If he says that he never suggested a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, how do we know if he actually did?
Simple: pop-up video. A news channel needs to have a debate re-cap show with pop-ups containing the actual facts. If a candidate asserts something that contradicts an event that’s been captured on video, pause it and show the footage.
I’m not kidding about this. Politicians get away with a lot because mainstream media never calls them on what they say. All the fact-checking happens in newspapers or on websites that the general population doesn’t read, or on websites too partisan to trust. Put it on TV, throw in an entertaining host, and back it up with real facts, substantiated with actual video, and you can show the American people just who’s being straight with them.