You don’t need a QR code to get the facts checked at Tuesday’s VP debate

CBS News will play host to the vice presidential debate. It will also be fact-checking, which it’s promoting by QR code. But you don’t really need to use that.

CBS is hosting Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. But this won’t be your run-of-the-mill debate, The New York Times tells us. This time around, CBS will be “using technology to try something new.”

That newfangled technology?

A website.

To be fair, that’s not exactly how CBS and the Times are putting it.

CBS’s digital arm, the Times reports, will be running what we internet publishing people sometimes call a “live blog,” which will fact-check some of Walz and Vance’s arguments. (Debate moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan won’t be doing a ton of fact-checking during the broadcast itself, CBS has said.)

But live blogs aren’t anything new.

The new, new thing, the Times stresses, will be that CBS will run a QR code onscreen during the debate. So viewers can use that tech to navigate to the liveblog run by a 20-person “CBS News Confirmed” team.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You are reading this on a website, so I’m confident you know how QR codes work. To spell it out anyway: QR codes are supposed to be shortcuts to take you to a website, using the camera on your smartphone.

But if you are holding a phone while you’re watching Tuesday’s debate, you certainly don’t need to use a QR code to get to CBS’s online fact-check: You can just type in CBSnews.com into your browser and it will do the same thing.

I’m only bothering to point this out because there’s a good chance that you view QR codes the way people view highway tolls: something you’d rather avoid if possible.

Despite the fact that technology companies and marketers have pushed QR codes our way for years, and insisted that we would come to love them — “they’re big in Asia,” we would often be told — Americans were historically quite resistant to them.

There’s a good reason for that. Using a QR code can often require opening up your phone’s camera app, pointing it at the digital tag on a poster or a TV screen, getting the camera to focus on the tag, and then clicking through once it displays a web address. Why not just open your phone’s web browser and tap in an address yourself?

You probably did end up using QR codes more frequently during the pandemic, where they became part of the “touchless” experience in some consumer settings, notably restaurants. But like other pandemic experiences, it looks like the QR code spike has faded post-Covid, now that people are happy to do stuff like hold menus in their hands.

Our corporate colleagues at Emarketer say there was a 25% rise in QR usage in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. They think the growth rate will have shrunk down to 5.1% this year.

And for the record: If you end up watching the debate on a channel that isn’t CBS — a slew of CBS competitors, including Fox, ABC, NBC, and CNN, will carry CBS’ broadcast of the event on their own air — then you won’t see any QR code at all. You’ll have no choice but to get to CBSnews.com the old-fashioned way. Which probably suits you just fine.