First came an announcement by ABC’s This Week interim moderator Jake Tapper that the program would team each week with the St. Petersburg Times‘ PolitiFact to fact-check guest interviews.
Now, NBC’s Meet the Press moderator David Gregory tells The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz that fact-checking is an “interesting idea” but that his program will not follow ABC’s lead. “People can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms.”
The fact-checking concept was originally proposed by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen in December. “Nice!” Rosen tweeted yesterday in response to Gregory’s quotes. “David Gregory probably thought this exercise was pointless,” he continued in another tweet. “Viewers of Face the Nation can do it themselves, right David?”
No response to Rosen has been posted by Gregory on his Twitter account.
Also in Kurtz’s column is news that Meet the Press will debut a new set on May 2. “The look is ultramodern,” Kurtz writes. “Floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a pair of huge video screens with a White House backdrop, a small, circular glass table as well as a larger, rectangular one.”
>More: In a tweet today, Rosen points out that Gregory told Politico in January that fact-checking was a “good idea” and that he and MTP staff were “going to talk about it”.