Trump will keep lying as long
as journalists enable it
News
outlets need better countermeasures to defend the public from disinformation.
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Journalists are supposed to be in the truth business.
For that reason, journalists should be deeply offended by
lies.
Politicians who lie are not colorful characters who enhance
journalists’ storytelling. They’re menaces who get in the way of journalists
delivering reliable facts to the public to make people’s lives better. Liars
are the enemies of journalism.
But Donald Trump’s ever-growing mountain of lies hasn’t crushed his
candidacy. In fact, it’s trained the news media to under-react to his lies, to
normalize them. Journalists aren’t offended nearly enough about being lied to.
They politely engage in fact-checking when they should be aggressively fact-crusading.
What does fact-crusading mean?
It means calling Trump’s lies “lies.” Not “a claim that is unsupported by
evidence” or an attempt to “reverse-engineer evidence” or “unconfirmed accusations to suit
his political narrative.”
It means not broadcasting Trump’s speeches live, but
instead taping them and stopping the tape to identify and correct the
lies.
It means not inviting proven liars like Tom Cotton and
Lindsey Graham on TV news shows to lie some more.
It means not automatically surrendering
paragraphs in news stories to allow Trump’s
spokespeople to lie without challenge.
It means telling right-wing liars to their faces, on live
TV, that they’re lying.
It means not peppering legitimate candidates with constant
questions about their opponents’ lies, letting those lies dictate the
agenda.
It means not assuming good intentions from politicians who
show us over and over that they have bad intentions.
It means not repeating Trump’s lies in headlines without
casting those lies as lies.
It means asking MAGA propagandists the same tough questions
over and over until they answer them. And if they refuse, declaring in real
time how many times they refused to answer.
It means cutting short an interview if a right-wing guest
won’t stop lying.
The media rarely seem willing to do these things, and
that’s why Trump and his fascist gang keep inventing and spreading hoaxes.
There’s no cost to their lies, and they know it. What’s needed is for
journalists to exact a cost – to take the steps I listed above to disarm
Trump’s lies, to punish him for making them. Punishing a liar isn’t unfair –
it’s how people in the truth business defend the public against
lies.
It may seem as if Trump is lying even more blatantly these days, such as
saying he doesn’t use a teleprompter while standing in front of
teleprompters. Lies like that show his mental instability,
but they don’t pose an immediate danger to people. Other lies do. People died
because of his lies about COVID and the 2020 election. And Trump’s vicious
smears against immigrants are particularly alarming. He claims Haitian
immigrants in Ohio are illegal even though they’re not, that those immigrants
eat their neighbors’ dogs and cats when they don't, that undocumented
immigrants are voting in large numbers when they’re not, and that the Biden
administration is depriving hurricane victims of aid to give the money to
immigrants when it’s not.
The rise of Nazism was fueled by a blood libel that Jews abducted children to steal their blood. In Trump’s
made-up version of America, immigrants want to invade your kitchen and slit
your throat. If Trump wins the White House based on this
type of racist rhetoric, immigrants will be in severe danger. And the rest of
us will be too.
When news outlets broadcast Trump’s lies and quietly
fact-check them hours or days later, they’re bringing a penknife to a gunfight.
They need to get more confrontational. Yes, it’s awkward to call out one
candidate when we’re in the middle of an election campaign. I get that. But I’m
not advocating that the media freeze out Donald Trump entirely. I’m simply
asking the media to make his lies less effective and thus less dangerous.
That’s impossible if a news outlet is focused on some vague concept of
neutrality instead of facts. Just last week, New York Times Executive Editor
Joe Kahn said: “In people's minds, there's very little neutral middle ground.
In our mind, it is the ground that we are
determined to occupy.”
What it looks like in practice is an attempt to find a
middle ground between truth and lies. And that creates fertile ground for
right-wing disinformation to thrive.
It’s probably too close to the election for the media to
enact the proper countermeasures against Trump even if they wanted to. But the
lying is ingrained in the entire Republican Party now and will be a toxic
threat long after he’s gone. Lying is how you get into the MAGA cult and stay
in the cult. The younger Republican liars are competing to succeed Trump as
chief liar. There’s no sense of guilt or regret – just ambition. Sometimes they
even admit lying, as if it’s just good politics.
Top Trump campaign official Corey Lewandowski was caught lying about the
Mueller investigation and said at a congressional hearing in 2019: “I have no obligation to be
honest with the media.” Vice presidential candidate JD Vance was
called out on his lies about Haitian immigrants and declared: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the
suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Without shared truths, democracy is impossible. MAGA
Republicans are lying because they want democracy to be impossible.
