Jon Stewart debates Fox News contributor ... and has a panel live fact check him!

[Aroddo]

Only it wasn't really a "fact check" at all. It was just 3 other people giving their own personal opinions.

Those 3 other people were 3 history professors asked to comment about what they make their living off. You can't get much more fact check than that.
Unless you want to suggest that facts have a liberal bias, of course.

 

[Formaldehyde]

But they weren't really represented as "fact checkers". They were merely authorities in their field who were supposed to "judge" the answers given by Napolitano and "Lincoln".

 

[sophie]

Those 3 other people were 3 history professors asked to comment about what they make their living off. You can't get much more fact check than that.
Unless you want to suggest that facts have a liberal bias, of course.

He's arguing that the concept of a "fact", particularly in history, and especially with the sorts of questions Jon Stewart was posing, is a spurious one.

 

[Aroddo]

But they weren't really represented as "fact checkers". They were merely authorities in their field who were supposed to "judge" the answers given by Napolitano and "Lincoln".

They factually fact checked Napolitano. Is fact checking only fact checking if you call it fact checking? Or is fact checking not fact checking if people only do it with their brains? Do you have to do a full peer review (for which the three present university professors are fully qualified) before your definition of fact checking is being met?

Anyway, Napolitano made several controversial statements, and was debated by Jon Stewart, after which 100% of all TV shows that would even bother to debate his claims will say something amounting to "here you have one opinion and an opposing one, let's leave it there".
However, Jon Stewart also invited history professors who by their very profession know more about this very topic than nearly anyone else. And they unanimously refuted the key arguments of Napolitano!

If you only watched the debate, people might actually think that Napolitano might as well be right because he is a competent debater. Unless you study history or look up his claims in historically accurate literature, you have no way of knowing if Napolitano is right or wrong.
Or you could just ask experts on the topic who don't have a hidden agenda to distort facts for personal or political gains. Which Jon Stewart did.

Ok, I stated that Jon Stewart fact checked Napolitano. But he did much more!
He demonstrated that a debate alone is not enough to find out the validity of an argument! This is especially true if you watch Fox News "debates", but it's true everywhere if a competent debater meets an unprepared journalist.

 

[Hygro]

That's not an unreasonable definition of fact check, but it's not a universally held one, and it's irrelevant to the context of, say, live television shows. Considering the makeup of this 'panel of judges', the nature of the topic and the questions, and the context in which it appeared, I think it's more than acceptable to refer to the panel as being comprised of fact-checkers.

Either way, it's a distinction without difference. Checking the terms of a television debate on history with a group of professional historians is very rare, like Aroddo said, and the effort was quite laudable. Whether individuals refer to that group as a panel of judges or as a panel of fact-checkers means nothing. If they were judges, their opinions held more weight than almost any other such panel that Napolitano would encounter on television, and if they were fact-checkers, they were limited by their abilities of personal recall and preparation slightly more than they would have otherwise been.

This I can get on board with.