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

At one moment early in the debate, the moderators seemed to be having a hard time suppressing their journalistic impulse to set the record straight. Contradicting Vance's arguments about “illegal immigrants” in Ohio, CBS's Margaret Brennan said, “Just to be clear to our viewers, there are a large number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have legal status,” which irritated Vance's objection brought in. “The rules said you wouldn’t fact check,” he protested.

Aside from that one “clarification,” the moderators have largely failed to do so. But contrary to what liberals may believe, the lack of fact-checking probably neither helped nor hurt Vance (and by extension, Donald Trump). The inconvenient truth is when, journalisticNews outlets like CBS have a duty to deny lies, politicallyFact checking is less of a panacea and more of a panacea.

Listen: When Fact Checks Backfire

Since Trump descended the escalator of his colorful tower to announce his presidential candidacy nearly a decade ago, the public has been inundated with a barrage of his lies. And as the media, voters and Trump opponents tried to figure out how to rein in a politician of unprecedented disloyalty, fact-checking and combating disinformation took on new importance in public life. In recent years, fact-checking has evolved from a necessary part of journalistic due diligence to a fetish object for Trump-weary Democrats. Some Democrats have expected too much from fact-checking and often seem to grant debunking a kind of political power to push back against Trumpism.

The 45th president has been the subject of a sustained fact-checking campaign for nearly a decade. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that no politician in American history has been more fact-checked than Donald Trump. And yet all those years of myth-busting had almost no impact on his electability. In the last election he managed to win new voters. And despite spewing racist nonsense about immigrants that has been thoroughly myth-debunked by journalists, he is increasing his share of voters of color without college degrees in this election.

My point is not that Democrats should abandon fact-checking, but rather that they need to remember that debunking is not a substitute for politics. At last month's presidential debate, when Trump repeated the conspiracy that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the moderator duly corrected this piece of xenophobic fearmongering. Harris, for her part, seemed to enjoy Trump's lies being broadcast live on air. “Speaking of extreme,” she said with a laugh, seeming to enjoy the moment.

What Harris not She took the opportunity to express something about her worldview or her political positions on immigration, or to point out that Springfield had welcomed immigrants to combat the economic consequences of decades of deindustrialization, itself the result of conservative trade policies that offshore -Activities favored manufacturing. While she basked in the glow of freshly verified facts, she forgot to outline a positive agenda, as if beating Trump was a slugfest where you win by knocking down any lies that come up.

Does anyone really think that the kind of voter who hears Trump's rant about cat-grilling immigrants – and isn't immediately disgusted – is likely to be touched by a CNN anchor who scolds them and tells them that it's actually not true? ? Will any right-leaning swing voter or nose-holding Republican actually reconsider his vote when he logs on to the CBS website — if he even bothers — and discovers that Vance lied when he claimed that Harris doesn't invest in clean air or so? she had been appointed “border tsarina”? By the way, will any Harris-endorsed Democrat reconsider their vote if they find out that Walz lied when he claimed he was in China during Tiananmen Square?

Read: JD Vance tries to rewrite history

CBS probably should have fact-checked the debate, since it is a news organization, news organizations provide journalism, and journalists fact-check. But journalists should also be honest about the limits of practice. Since it is impossible to detect every falsehood, journalists are forced to make judgments about which lies are significant enough to refute. Republicans distrust this selection process and roll their eyes at the misinformation that they believe unfairly targets their fellow party members while ignoring Democrats' dishonesty. And all too often, journalists spread blatant lies while themselves committing lies of omission. For months, many journalists ignored the fact that Joe Biden was deteriorating before their eyes and had the audacity to tell the American public that videos showing the octogenarian president looking visibly confused were something called “cheap fakes.”

Placing political hopes on fact-checking isn't just bad for journalism, which is reduced to a partisan tool. It's also bad for Democrats because they forget to make it clear to the American public that they have better policies. Donald Trump remains a fixture in American life not because he has failed to adequately check the facts—everyone, including his supporters, knows he is a bullshit artist—but because politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, have failed to do so , to convincingly demonstrate that they have truth offerings that are better than his lies.