Trump will keep lying as long as journalists enable it

 

Trump will keep lying as long as journalists enable it

News outlets need better countermeasures to defend the public from disinformation.

Mark Jacob Oct 15

 

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.

LOSER, CONVICT AND TRAITOR

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

Don’t Send Your Kids to College 

In our emerging economy, learning how to do something, like carpentry, may have more value than going to a university for four expensive years. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

OCT 15, 2024

Want your kids to still love you when they’re in their 30s, when they’ve started work at a real job, busted their butts for a few years, maybe had a child or two of their own, and hopefully come to appreciate how hard you had to work – at whatever you did – to provide them with viable options and serious opportunities for a strong and secure future?

If so, then now’s a great time to do your offspring a real favor, wherever they are on the education and employment treadmill.  Tell them that, for the next decade or so, the smart money is on vocational training, OJT and concrete careers rather than investing four or more years on college and grad school followed by a fruitless search for employment in areas of the economy that are disappearing. Today, I’d rather be a longshoreman than a lawyer, a builder rather than a banker and, for sure, a plumber rather than a political science major.

The ugly alternative for millions of students whose parents, like so many lemmings, followed the traditional route and fumbled their kids’ future, is to condemn them after college to a few years of wishful thinking, lots of numbing networking, go-nowhere gigs, and endless pleading emails to family and friends. All of that accompanied by a challenging clump of college debt that will likely be an albatross around their necks for decades. In addition to the unavoidable loan repayment load, these graduates suffer from the deluded and misleading indoctrination offered by the faculties of most colleges and universities. These Ph.D. fantasy factories do a miserable job of setting realistic expectations and goals for their graduates.

A-range grades at Harvard and Yale represent almost 80% of all grades “earned” by students at these two schools. You might ask yourself how those participation awards compare with the typical distribution of team members’ performances in your company and how this kind of  “everyone’s a star and a winner” crap is helpful in preparing students for the vagaries and vicissitudes of the working world. Inflated grading on a curve doesn’t help anyone outside of these institutions although it keeps the campers and their parents very happy.  

The reason we’re seeing so many employers unhappy with the newest crop of employees has a lot more to do with attitude problems, unreal expectations, and accelerated entitlement than with actual aptitude. That’s because in the real world of work, you learn a cruel lesson early on: that the amount of education you allegedly need to get a job has risen much faster than the amount of education you actually need to do a job.

DON’T FIGHT THE TREND

There are three main reasons for this disparity:

First, the present job occupants don’t want  new, younger threats to their own positions, so they raise the bar, expand the requirements, and effectively pull up the drawbridge. But much to their dismay, the inbound tide is unstoppable. By 2025, there will be more Gen Z’s in the workforce than boomers– and the Gen Z’s are coming for those very jobs.

Second, there are fewer and fewer available jobs in certain “soft skill” sectors like banking, finance, and publishing, because the mid-level positions in every organization are being compressed or eliminated. So, the competition for scarcer slots is fiercer than ever and the paper credentials required are more substantial, even though they may have little bearing on the candidate’s actual ability to do the job in question. In the long haul, preparation, perspiration and passion ultimately win out over diplomas from even the fanciest schools.

The third reason is the growth and expansion of disruptive technologies, which are changing the work requirements in many of these fields. There’s no doubt that automation, robotics and AI are job killers, but the nasty little secret is that the expected devastation is highly targeted and primarily aimed at middle management, administrators, editors, and bean counters.

WHERE THE JOBS ARE

But the good news is that the front-line folks — the ones who need to deal with and deliver the goods and services to the ultimate customers, the ones who work with their hands and their heads — will always have secure positions. This is true across the board, whether it’s construction, maintenance, early education, nursing and elder care, or anything in hospitality and retail. You’re always going to need a meat sack at the end of the production line if you care at all about customer satisfaction and results.

Columnist George Will says that we don’t have enough trained workers to build our nuclear subs and those vessels are the most formidable tools we have to defend our shores and discourage our enemies on multiple fronts. We’re going to need millions of new team members to support our most fundamental industries and they’re not going to be coming exclusively from traditional colleges and universities.

I’m increasingly convinced that vocational education, industry apprenticeships, and union labor may save our kids as well as our ships. We all learn by doing, not just by watching or listening. It’s a “put up or shut up” world today. When you’re working side-by-side with others who’ve been there and done it, the ongoing “education” isn’t limited to specific physical skills; you learn a lot about cooperation, connection, community and work ethic. Unlike college, it’s never just about you.

The bottom line: I’d rather be a welder than a writer, a mechanic not a mathematician, and a nurse rather than a naturalist.

 

PUT TRUMP AWAY NOW

 

GUILTY CONVICT SPEWING LIES AND HATE

 

Trump and Vance go to war against real-time fact checks

 

Trump goes to war against real-time fact checks

The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods.

By Ashley Parker

 and 

Josh Dawsey

October 14, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

 

Donald Trump and his campaign have waged an aggressive campaign against fact-checking in recent months, pushing TV networks, journalism organizations and others to abandon the practice if they hope to interact with Trump.

 

Trump nearly backed out of an August interview with a group of Black journalists after learning they planned to fact-check his claims. The following month, he and his allies repeatedly complained about the fact-checking that occurred during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, berating journalists and news executives in the middle of the televised debate.

 

And this month, Trump declined to sit down for an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” because he objected to the show’s practice of fact-checking, according to the show.

Campaign advisers also expressly asked CBS News to forgo fact checking in its vice-presidential debate with Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — who then complained on air when a moderator corrected him.

 

The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods, which have formed the bedrock of his political message for years. Just in recent weeks, for example, Trump has seized on fabricated tales of migrants eating pets and Venezuelan gangs overtaking cities in pushing his anti-immigration message as he seeks a second term in office.

 

Lucas Graves, a journalism and mass communications professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that publicly chafing at fact-checking has become a form of tribalism among some Republicans.

 

“Within the political establishment on the right, it is now considered quite legitimate — and quite legitimate to say publicly and openly — that you disapprove of fact-checking,” said Lucas, author of “Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism. “Precisely because of Trump’s unusual relationship with the truth — even for a politician — it’s hardly surprising that he would object to it so volubly and so forcefully.”

The Washington Post Fact Checker team tallied that by the end of Trump’s presidency, he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims — an average of about 21 false, erroneous or misleading claims a day.

 

In August, Trump had agreed to appear at a National Association of Black Journalists gathering, where three of the group’s members would interview him. But upon realizing that he would be fact-checked in real time, Trump’s team said he would not be taking the stage.

 

NABJ president Ken Lemon described a tense scene backstage as Trump’s team objected to any fact-checking of the interview, with the discussions lasting more than an hour. “If you guys are going to fact check, he’s not going to take the stage,” Lemon said a Trump aide told him. “They were just totally insistent that he was not going to take the stage if we fact-checked.”

 

Lemon said he spoke with three Trump aides — who at one point called to confer with someone not at the event — about their objections to fact-checking as the audience waited.

At one point, Lemon said he became convinced Trump was ultimately going to back out of the interview over his fact-checking concerns, so Lemon prepared remarks to go out and explain the cancellation to the crowd. But in the end, Trump took part in the interview, making headlines by falsely suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black.

 

“It was a very revealing moment where we got to hear him answer questions, and we were shocked at what some of the answers were,” Lemon said.

 

Trump officials blamed the delay in taking the stage on technical audio issues.

 

“Here’s the truth: President Trump initially couldn’t take the stage because there were audio issues. Once the audio issues were resolved, President Trump took the stage and participated in the discussion, and the fact-checks still occurred,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said in a statement.

 

BOTH SIDES BULLSHIT BY THESE MORON REPORTERS STARTS HERE….THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO TRY TO VAGUELY LUMP HARRIS IN WITH TRUMP AND VANCE’S LIES

 

Harris, too, has taken a cautious approach to interviews, largely eschewing rigorous policy questioners for lower-stakes venues and having her advisers, at times, try to prescreen questions. Her blitz this week of unscripted media settings hewed to friendly questioners, including Howard Stern of Sirius XM, CBS’s “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” and the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast. During Harris’s NABJ forum, the interviewers pressed less contentiously than they did Trump, and during the ABC presidential debate with Trump, the moderators did not fact check her in the same manner.

 

One Trump adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the campaign’s thinking, argued that Trump is treated more harshly than others. “Every candidate is opposed to fact checking on some degree, but if you’re Trump, you know they are always going to go after you harder,” the adviser said.

 

 

But Harris does not misstate the truth regularly, as Trump does, and she has also not protested being fact-checked. And unlike Trump, she sat down for a wide-ranging interview with “60 Minutes” that aired last week.  WHAT A BELATED SURPRISE ADMISSION..HARRIS DOESN’T LIE…

 

As part of Harris’s interview, the show took the extraordinary step of explaining why it was not airing a similar segment with Trump, who had initially agreed to an interview before changing his mind.

 

“A week ago, Trump backed out,” CBS correspondent Scott Pelley explained. “The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story. Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020.”

 

Pelley went on to explain that the 2020 incident for which Trump requested an apology had never occurred.

 

Campaign advisers acknowledged there were discussions with CBS over fact-checking, and the campaign objected to the network wanting to cut into the interview to fact-check.

The two debates — first with President Joe Biden and then with Harris after Biden dropped out — proved another point of contention. Trump’s team repeatedly raised objections in negotiations that it did not want a fact-checking element during the debates, and continued to ask networks about the issue in the weeks leading up to the events, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private negotiations.

 

During the debate between Trump and Biden, CNN publicly stated in advance that the moderators would not fact-check, instead leaving that to the candidates.

 

Before the second debate, Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the team was told by an ABC journalist that similar to the CNN debate, there would be no fact checks from the moderators. However, a copy of the ABC News debate rules, obtained by The Post, did not put any limitations on fact checking.

 

Nonetheless, Trump and his allies were furious with ABC for pointedly fact-checking Trump live during his debate with Harris. At one point, after Trump falsely claimed that some Democrats support executing babies after birth, moderator Linsey Davis noted, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

 

At another point — after Trump repeated the false and baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs — moderator David Muir interjected to say that ABC News had reached out to the city manager, who “told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

 

Trump’s advisers — including Chris LaCivita and Miller — erupted at ABC executives and journalists in the middle of the debate, according to the people familiar with the situation. They implored the network to stop fact-checking for the rest of the event and said it had breached its promise, and a call was even lodged to the president of ABC News by Susie Wiles, the campaign’s top aide. At least one Trump adviser demanded to talk to the moderators during the debate.

 

The network declined to comment.

 

“Everyone who watched the ABC debate agreed that it was a 3-on-1 fight with 2 moderators who wrongly ‘fact-checked’ President Trump multiple times, but did not fact check Kamala Harris ONCE, even though she spewed multiple lies on the debate stage,” Leavitt said in her statement. “The ABC debate was widely viewed as one of the worst moderated debates in history, yet President Trump still won.”

 

Harris spokesman Kevin Munoz responded: “You have to lie to be fact-checked, and only one person on that stage was telling lie after lie.”

 

By the time Vance was preparing for a CBS debate with Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the issue of fact-checking was ever-present. During Vance’s debate preparations, Trump advisers had former Fox News contributor Monica Crowley play the role of a fact-checking journalist, according to people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe deliberations.

 

In meetings with network executives, Vance’s team insisted there would be no fact-checking, and CBS officials said they did not expect moderators to jump in and correct candidates, leaving it up to the candidates themselves, the people said.

 

However, at one point, moderator Margaret Brennan corrected a comment Vance had made about the “illegal immigrants” that he claimed where overwhelming Springfield, Ohio, noting that the city’s large population of Haitian immigrants in fact have “legal status — temporary protected status.”

 

“Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check,” Vance said. Behind the scenes, his team also raised strenuous objections with the network, arguing that such a moment was not supposed to have occurred. CBS declined to comment.

 

The exchange was brief, but by then, the Trump-Vance ticket’s desire to eschew fact-checking had so penetrated the public consciousness that “Saturday Night Live” poked fun at it in their next episode, when Bowen Yang, playing Vance, uttered a series of falsehoods while repeatedly muttering for the moderators not to check his facts.

 

“You know, Nora, it’s rich to say that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power — we said no fact checking — and willingly, and willingly — don’t check that — got on his plane without incident — don’t — right after saving Obamacare — don’t check that,” Yang-as-Vance said as the audience laughed.