We're considering fact-checking political ads as short videos. Here's why we think it could reach voters who don't seek out reliable news.

NewsYou asked us to expose political ad lies. Here’s what we’re considering: Letter from the Editor(Illustration based on photo by Advance Local.)Illustration created with AI toolsBy Chris Quinn, Editor, cleveland.com/The Plain DealerPolitical ads have given our newsroom a quandary this year, and we think the solution might be doing something unprecedented as a public service readers keep asking us for.The issue is that the ads this year are the worst we’ve ever seen. As readers put it, the ads no longer attack a candidate’s policies. They dehumanize the candidate, cruelly.And because the Supreme Court made the boneheaded decision to treat money as speech without limits, the cash flowing into Ohio has generated more of these ads than anyone can remember seeing. Readers keep asking us to call out the problem and to point out the lies in them.We have a couple of things coming immediately. I asked Editorial Board members to take on the subject in their roundtable publishing Sunday. And I turned to subscribers of my weekday text messages for their perspectives. More than 700 replied, and a story summarizing their thoughts publishes Monday.But that’s not enough to satisfy readers who are anxious about voters believing the ads, which are loaded with lies. They want fact checking.Here’s my problem: The people who read The Plain Dealer, cleveland.com, my text messages and this column already recognize the ads are lies because they seek out reliable news sources. Fact checks could give them more detail and evidence to share, but publishing those checks only on the usual platforms would not solve a bigger problem.What about all those voters who do not work to be informed, who don’t visit with reliable news sources? Our readers tell us they fear uninformed voters will believe the nonsense hurled at them in the political ads and vote accordingly. That’s a good point. How do we reach them?We have an idea.We have a large and growing audience for the short videos we publish on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. As I’ve written previously we’ve significantly ramped up the number of stories we convert into short video, and that number will rapidly grow over the coming months. What if we designed our fact checking for political ads specifically for that format? We’ve not done that before. We always start with stories on the website. Designing our fact checks as short videos from the outset could make them quite compelling.We’re thinking about something that begins with “5 lies in candidate x’s latest political ad on candidate y,” followed by a 1-2-3-4-5 format identifying the false claims and explaining the truth. Short, Simple. Emphatically calling out lies. We’d identify who is responsible for the ad, whether a candidate or outside group.We could easily reverse engineer those videos into short stories on our other platforms, but like I said, the audiences on those platforms largely know what the falsehoods are. We think this could be a significant public service. And if we do it right, we think it could have real impact.We’re considering assigning two reporters to do nothing but the research for these videos through Election Day, drawing on the expertise of our Statehouse and politics team. Our video team would then do the work of creating the finished product.I asked where you get your news. You told me something more important: Letter from the EditorIf reading dies, what happens to journalism? Letter from the EditorData centers are hurting Ohioans. Our job is to say so: Letter from the EditorWe know from our history that solid fact checking can change impact a race. In 2012, Josh Mandel challenged Sherrod Brown for the U.S. Senate. We were a partner with PolitiFact at the time and repeatedly fact-checked claims in that race. Mandel statements repeatedly earned Pants on Fire ratings.Back then, a trusted media source showing a candidate to be a liar mattered to voters. That seems quaint by today’s standards, when every ad seems to be filled with lies, and our eyes glaze over in acceptance. But I said in 2012 and maintain now that calling out Mandel’s repeated lies changed how voters saw him. I believe his dishonesty cost him votes.The landscape is far different today, but readers tell us they want to know the truth, and they want others to know, too. With videos, we hope to reach a large swath of themBefore we lock in, we want to hear your thoughts.I’m at cquinn@cleveland.comThanks for readingChris has spent more than 4 decades in journalism, 3 of them in Cleveland, Ohio, working as a reporter, line editor and newsroom leader. He writes a weekday text message to subscribers to his free text account...