Pants on Fire!

The recent presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a sorry spectacle that ended with two old men being childish about their golf handicaps.

- NAVTEJ SARNA

But Biden had at least one bright moment when he deployed a rare word malarkey—to describe the torrent of misinformation unleashed by Trump. Biden couldn’t quite keep up with that cascade as he was too busy waffling; fittingly, he stopped by at Waffle House on his way home after the debate.

I had to look up ‘malarkey’. An American invention from the 1920s, it has synonyms aplenty: balderdash, baloney, blah, poppycock…. You get the point. The sheer amount of malarkey during that debate was described by one news platform as a “tsunami of falsity”; not surprisingly, fact-checkers are now having a field day spotting, categorising, grading the falsehoods and issuing corrections. Fact-checking, once an in-house job assigned to juniors and interns, is today a fast-growing pillar of modern journalism offering skyhigh growth. The raw material that fuels this profession seems unlimited: a never-ending supply of falsehood, fake news, half-truths and biased reporting. All easily and instantly propagated over the internet and social media.