Ahead of last night’s vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, CBS’ decision not to let moderators provide live fact-checking became a minor controversy. One expert argued that this amounted to giving the truth-challenged Vance “license to lie,” and many Democratic faithful voiced similar complaints on social media. Mother Jones even went so far as to pre-screen the debate. The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign stated: “JD Vance is going to lie tonight. A lot of. That’s why we’re going to tell you the facts.” It then fact-checked the event in real time and pointed out Vance’s evasions and deceptions.

At one point early in the debate, the moderators seemed to have difficulty suppressing their journalistic impulse to correct the facts. CBS’s Margaret Brennan contradicted Vance’s statements about “illegal immigrants” in Ohio, saying, “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, has a large number of Haitian immigrants with legal status,” prompting an irritated objection from Vance yielded. “The rules were that you weren’t allowed to fact-check,” he protested.

Apart from that one “clarification” the moderators mostly didn’t do that. But contrary to what liberals may think, the lack of fact-checking probably hasn’t helped or hurt Vance (and by extension, Donald Trump). The uncomfortable truth is that if journalismnews media like CBS have a duty to challenge lies, politicsFact checking is less a panacea and more a panacea.

Listen: When fact checks backfire

Since Trump descended the escalator of his ostentatious tower to announce his presidential bid nearly a decade ago, the public has been inundated with a barrage of his lies. And as the media, voters and Trump’s opponents tried to figure out how to rein in a politician of unprecedented perfidy, fact-checking and combating disinformation took on new prominence in public life. In the intervening years, fact-checking has gone from a necessary bit of journalistic due diligence to a fetish object for Trump-weary Democrats. Some Democrats came to expect too much from fact-checking, and often seem to lend a kind of political power to debunking Trumpism in order to push back on Trumpism.

The 45th president has been subject to a sustained fact-checking campaign for the better part of a decade. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that no politician in American history has been more thoroughly fact-checked than Donald Trump. And yet all those years of myth-busting have had virtually no impact on his electoral viability. At the last elections he managed to recruit new voters. And even as he spouts racist nonsense about immigrants — which has been thoroughly debunked by journalists — he is increasing his share of non-college-educated voters of color in this election.

My point is not that Democrats should give up fact-checking, but that they should remember that debunking is not a substitute for politics. During the presidential debate last month, when Trump repeated the conspiracy that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the moderator duly corrected this piece of xenophobic fear-mongering. For her part, Harris seemed to enjoy Trump’s lies broadcast live on air. “Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing, seeming to enjoy the moment.

What Harris it didn’t What I wanted to do was take the opportunity to say something about her worldview or policy positions on immigration, or point out that Springfield had welcomed immigrants as a way to combat the economic toll of decades of deindustrialization, which itself was the result of conservative trade policies that helped the offshore economy produce. Basking in the glow of the newly verified fact, she forgot to outline a positive agenda, as if defeating Trump would be a game of whack-a-mole in which you win by crushing whatever lies emerge.

Does anyone really believe that the kind of voter who hears Trump talk about immigrants barbecuing cats — and isn’t immediately disgusted — is likely to be moved by a CNN moderator tsk-tsking him and explaining that that’s not actually true? ? Will a right-leaning voter or a Republican with his nose in the air actually reconsider his vote if he logs onto the CBS website — if he even bothers — and discovers that Vance lied when he claimed Harris does not invest in clean air or that she was appointed ‘border czar’? By the way, will a Harris-dominated Democrat reconsider his vote if he finds out that Walz lied about his presence in China during Tiananmen Square?

Read: JD Vance is trying to rewrite history

It is likely that CBS should have fact-checked the debate, because it is a news channel, news channels provide journalism and journalists check the facts. But journalists must also be honest about the limits of practice. Because it is impossible to expose every untruth, journalists are forced to make judgments about which lies are important enough to be debunked. Republicans distrust that selection process and roll their eyes at the bickering over disinformation, which they say unfairly targets their fellow supporters while passing over Democratic dishonesty. And all too often, journalists spread blatant lies while committing lies or omissions themselves. Many journalists ignored the truth that Joe Biden was deteriorating before their eyes for months, and had the audacity to tell the American public that videos of the octogenarian president looking visibly disheveled were something called “cheap fakes.”

Pinning political hopes on fact-checking is not only bad for journalism, which is reduced to a partisan tool. It’s also bad for Democrats because they forget to convey to the American public that they have better policies. Donald Trump remains a fixture in American life, not because of insufficient fact-checking — everyone, including his supporters, knows he’s a bullshit artist — but because politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, have failed to convincingly demonstrate that they have truths to have. offer that is better than his lies.