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Backstory: We cut off President Trump's remarks about a "rigged" election Thursday night. Here's why.
Nicole Carroll
I'm USA TODAY editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll, and this is The Backstory, insights into our biggest stories of the week. If you'd like to get The Backstory free in your inbox every week, sign up here.
President Trump Thursday made unfounded claims that the presidential election was corrupt and fraudulent. In response, we cut off his live remarks and removed the video from our platforms. I want to explain why.
Our job is to cover the news, but our mission is to spread truth and to stop misinformation.
Some things don't have two sides. Facts are not up for debate. And when the president of the United States, from the White House, tries to tear down one of the bedrocks of American democracy, a fair and free election, that is no longer news. It is propaganda.
This is not censorship. There is no mandate that we air everything a political leader says. That is state-controlled media. His remarks weren't about political differences but undermining Americans' confidence in the democratic process.
We simply chose not to use our platforms to amplify this dangerous message, with the potential to incite violence, in real time when it was impossible to provide facts and context simultaneously. We covered the speech carefully and fully afterward.
Of course we cover potential voting issues or irregularities aggressively. They should be brought forth to the appropriate authorities for investigation. The Trump campaign has launched legal challenges in multiple states, but legal experts say most of the cases have no chance of having a major impact on the election's outcome.
"It's throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks," said Rachael Cobb, chair of Suffolk University's Department of Government, told our reporters. "There is no clear indication of an egregious failure of election administrations. And why would we stop counting votes? We live in a democracy."
There was bipartisan condemnation of Trump's remarks. Major news networks, with the exception of FOX and CNN, also cut away from his appearance.
"A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon," retiring Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd wrote on Twitter. "Every American should have his or her vote counted."
Election interference claims:We fact checked viral ones and found false claims.
'But what if it's true?' some readers asked. There is no evidence of widespread fraud. And we fact checked the speech immediately. Here is just part of what our journalists reported.
Trump statement: "We were winning in all the key locations, by a lot, actually, and then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away, in secret."
Fact: Trump led initial returns in several states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, because early tallies included primarily in-person Election Day votes, which skewed toward the president. Trump supporters were less inclined to take part in expanded mail-voting than Joe Biden supporters, so Trump supporters dominated the Election Day vote. Biden supporters dominated mail-voting by a 2-to-1 margin.
Election officials in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could not begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, and Michigan had only a 10-hour head start, forcing multiple days to count ballots in each state. Combined with the massive spike in mail-voting during the pandemic, it created a dynamic known as the "red dawn" in which Trump jumped out to an early lead but Biden passed him in many states as absentee ballots were counted after Election Day.
Trump statement: "Michigan, we won the state. In Wisconsin, we did likewise, fantastically well. And that got whittled down. In every case, they got whittled down."
Fact: Trump did not win either state. He was leading in early returns. In every state, as counties tally votes and turn them into state election officials, the race changes. But the final outcome is not set until all counties report their votes, and until election officials tally early votes or absentee votes cast within the state's prescribed timeline. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump's early lead diminished as additional votes were tallied.
According to the unofficial vote totals, Biden won Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump statement: "I talked about mail-in voting for a long time. It's really destroyed our system. It's a corrupt system."
Fact: Mail-in voting has long been used around the country. In fact, three states vote exclusively by mail in all their elections: Hawaii, Oregon and Washington.
Bottom line: The drawn-out vote counting and the changing numbers don't show a system that's "rigged." It shows a system that is working to carefully count every vote.
More than 65 million of this election's 140 million voters dropped ballots in the mail or at secure sites nationwide. Each one has to be opened and verified. In seven states, laws prevent officials from starting to count those ballots until Election Day, which means in-person votes will be tallied faster than mail-in ballots.
And what about voting fraud? Reporter Tom Vanden Brook explains: "…voter fraud – stuffing ballot boxes or voting multiple times – is an exceedingly rare crime with almost no chance of affecting the presidential election. Though Trump has repeatedly claimed that absentee ballot fraud is widespread, only 207 entries in a Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database are listed under the 'fraudulent absentee ballot' category."
And the overall database statistics don't tell the full picture. USA TODAY journalists, working with Columbia Journalism Investigations and the PBS series "Frontline,'' investigated the entire Heritage database of 1,298 voting fraud examples (dating to 1982) and found that they included "misleading and incomplete information that overstates the number of alleged fraud instances and includes cases where no crime was committed."
So back to our decision to pull down Trump's remarks Thursday. We didn't make it lightly.
When President Trump made misleading statements during his Coronavirus Task Force briefings, many urged us not to livestream the remarks. Instead, we assembled an army of reporters to fact check his statements in real time and displayed those fact on the screen at the same time he was speaking. (We continued live, on-screen fact checks during the presidential and vice presidential debates.) We were able to balance the news value of the briefings with our responsibility to provide accurate information.
But when the president stands in the White House and says, without evidence, that he "will not allow the corruption to steal such an important election or any election for that matter. And we can't allow silence, anybody to silence our voters and manufacture results," we are way beyond news value and into legitimately dangerous territory.
It is the duty of journalists to call that out.
Nicole Carroll is the editor-in-chief of USA TODAY. Reach her at EIC@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter here. Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free experience or electronic newspaper replica here.