- If you need stay — or near stay — fact-checking throughout Tuesday’s VP debate, you will not get a ton of it from the CBS broadcast.
- But CBS News will supply fact-checking by way of its web site.
CBS is internet hosting Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. But this may not be your run-of-the-mill debate, The New York Times tells us. This time round, CBS can be “utilizing know-how to strive one thing new.”
That newfangled know-how?
A web site.
To be honest, that is not precisely how CBS and the Times are placing it.
CBS’s digital arm, the Times reviews, can be operating what we web publishing individuals generally name a “stay weblog,” which can fact-check a few of Walz and Vance’s arguments. (Debate moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will not be doing a ton of fact-checking throughout the broadcast itself, CBS has stated.)
But stay blogs aren’t something new.
The new, new factor, the Times stresses, can be that CBS will run a QR code onscreen throughout the debate. So viewers can use that tech to navigate to the liveblog run by a 20-person “CBS News Confirmed” staff.
That’s it. That’s the entire thing.
You are studying this on a web site, so I’m assured you understand how QR codes work. To spell it out anyway: QR codes are speculated to be shortcuts to take you to a web site, utilizing the digicam in your smartphone.
But if you’re holding a cellphone whilst you’re watching Tuesday’s debate, you actually do not want to make use of a QR code to get to CBS’s on-line fact-check: You can simply sort in CBSnews.com into your browser and it’ll do the identical factor.
I’m solely bothering to level this out as a result of there is a good likelihood that you simply view QR codes the best way individuals view freeway tolls: one thing you’d moderately keep away from if attainable.
Despite the truth that know-how corporations and entrepreneurs have pushed QR codes our approach for years, and insisted that we might come to like them — “they’re huge in Asia,” we might usually be informed — Americans have been traditionally fairly proof against them.
There’s a very good motive for that. Using a QR code can usually require opening up your cellphone’s digicam app, pointing it on the digital tag on a poster or a TV display screen, getting the digicam to deal with the tag, after which clicking by as soon as it shows an internet deal with. Why not simply open your cellphone’s internet browser and faucet in an deal with your self?
You most likely did find yourself utilizing QR codes extra regularly throughout the pandemic, the place they turned a part of the “touchless” expertise in some shopper settings, notably eating places. But like different pandemic experiences, it appears to be like just like the QR code spike has pale post-Covid, now that persons are glad to do stuff like maintain menus of their palms.
Our company colleagues at Emarketer say there was a 25% rise in QR utilization in 2020, the primary 12 months of the pandemic. They assume the expansion fee may have shrunk down to five.1% this 12 months.
And for the document: If you find yourself watching the controversy on a channel that is not CBS — a slew of CBS opponents, together with Fox, ABC, NBC, and CNN, will carry CBS’ broadcast of the occasion on their very own air — then you definitely will not see any QR code in any respect. You’ll haven’t any selection however to get to CBSnews.com the old school approach. Which most likely fits you simply positive.
