It's a fact. We are in 2024, but we have one more 2023 end-of-year list we didn't get to last week. It's a look back at some of the top North Carolina political fact-checks. To talk about them, WFAE's Marshall Terry is joined by Paul Specht of WRAL.
Marshall Terry: OK, Paul. The biggest political story in North Carolina was state Rep. Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County and her switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party that gave the GOP the one seat they needed to have a supermajority and override Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes at will. Now during a press conference in April, Cotham laid out her reasons for switching and you took a closer look at them. What did you find?
Paul Specht: Right. She claimed that Democrats sort of created a hostile environment for her and pushed her out. More specifically, that Gov. Roy Cooper wanted to pick her seat on the House floor, that Robert Reives called for her to resign, and that he didn't speak to her during her time at the legislature.
And, we reached out to Reives and Cooper's office and asked about those claims. And what we found was they were either exaggerated or false or not possible.
By that I mean, she claimed that Cooper wanted to pick her seat on the House floor. That's not possible. Republicans control where people sit on the House floor because they have the majority. Robert Reives produced text messages that he said showed their interactions between January and April, when she switched teams, so to speak, and it showed a friendly relationship where they texted emojis back and forth. They checked in on each other, they had exchanges about bills that were coming up for a vote, and even one where Reives invited her out to dinner.
The one that we put a rating on was her claim that Reives called on her to resign or face a primary challenge after she missed a vote dealing with gun rights. The Democrats were trying to keep a gun control measure. Republicans ended up getting the votes they needed to repeal that law that was in place. And then Reives put out a statement saying — I'm paraphrasing here, of course — if voters don't like the result of today's vote, if you'll please participate in the next primary or general election. Well, Cotham took that as a shot at her. Although the statement did not mention her specifically, so we rated that one mostly false.
Terry: OK, Paul. When compiling this list of fact-checks, you put several of them into the category of what you call claims about liberal ambitions. And one of those came in an e-mail from the Thom Tillis Committee, which supports the Republican U.S. senator. It read, “The Democrats are once again trying to infringe on the constitutional rights of America's citizens by proposing a 1,000% gun tax on most firearms.” So what's the background there, and how did you rate that one?
Specht: This one had some truth to it. Frankly, it surprised me because it's not every day that you see a proposal for a 1,000% tax increase on anything. But there was a Democrat in Congress — he introduced a bill to impose a new tax on high-capacity magazines and other guns, and it would be 1,000%. Now whether or not it would affect “most guns” remains to be seen. The language of the bill was sort of convoluted. The bill was designed to go after assault rifles but some of the language in the bill left some gun experts saying, Hey, you know, depending on how these words are interpreted, it could apply to much more than what the bill writers intended. Ultimately, we rated it half-true.
Terry: Now your fact-checks didn't always include something a politician or political party said. A viral social media post last May suggested that three North Carolina health care systems — Duke, UNC and East Carolina University — introduced gender-transition-related medical care for children between the ages of 2 and 4. What's the context there? And how did that one turn out?
Specht: There was a blog on a conservative website that made claims about three North Carolina hospital systems, and then people made graphics based on that blog and circulated them on social media, and it claimed that those hospital systems were trying to get children to change their gender at a young age.
Well, those hospital systems told us no, that's not what we do here, for one. And two, we found that the claims in the blog and in the social media posts really misrepresented the nature of gender dysphoria, as well as the treatments involved.
For instance, the claim suggested that if a young boy started to play with Barbies, that that might qualify as gender dysphoria. Well, experts have said that's not true, that's not enough for a gender dysphoria diagnosis. And then let's say that there are some markers or identifiers that a child might be struggling — those would be depression, and the treatments would be more counseling than anything. They would not involve heavy medication or hormone treatments.
There's a lot of context missing. It jumped to a lot of conclusions, and ultimately we rated it false.
Terry: OK. So those were just some of the fact-checks you did last year. What are you focused on this year? I mean, with a huge election this November, it seems like there will be no shortage of claims on both sides to check out, right?
Specht: Right. So we expect to rate lots of claims about how the economy is doing, jobs created, inflation has been a huge topic the last few years. Abortion has become an even bigger issue since Roe v Wade was overturned, so we expect to see a lot of claims on that front. But the big trend that will be new this year is in artificial intelligence and its ability to sort of create images and videos out of nothing.
You know, historically you need a photo or a transcript or an existing audio to manipulate if you want to mislead your audience. With advancements in AI, political actors or campaigns, or whoever, no longer need that. They can just sort of tell these AI generators to create an image or create audio or create a video that creates an entirely new fabricated reality. And so that's what we're going to be keeping an eye out for is campaign ads or social media claims that use this new technology to try to trick voters in North Carolina.
