| Forum Home | | Log in | | Signup | | My Page  | |
Rules | | FAQ | | Boards | | Members | | Search |
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The above list shows replies to the following message: |
|
Msg. 28544 of 65535 |
|
Yes, Donald Trump ‘lies.’ A lot. And news organizations should say so. THE MORNING PLUM: When Donald Trump lies, is he telling a lie? Not if we cannot prove an intent to mislead, apparently. With Trump set to take control of the presidency, media figures are currently engaged in a spirited debate over how to handle the Trump administration’s approach to the news media, now that it looks likely he will continue employing the unprecedented levels of dishonesty he wielded to great effect during the campaign. The early returns in this debate are not encouraging. In fact, they suggest that we in the news media are simply unprepared for the challenges the Trump presidency will pose to us. I’ve already tried to argue that news orgs are needlessly helping Trump’s use of unverified claims result in precisely the headlines he wants. Now here’s yet another data point. On “Meet the Press,” Chuck Todd pressed Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker on whether his paper would call out Trump’s lies for what they are, as other news orgs have been doing with more regularity. Baker’s response is worth quoting in full, because it should go into the time capsule for future generations to ponder in puzzling out what happened in this country at the outset of the 21st century: I’d be careful about using the word, “lie.” “Lie” implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead. … when Donald Trump says thousands of people were on the rooftops of New Jersey on 9/11 celebrating, thousands of Muslims were there celebrating, I think it’s right to investigate that claim, to report what we found, which is that nobody found any evidence of that whatsoever, and to say that. I think it’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind to say, “This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable, trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don’t think that’s true.” I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective. And I do think also it applies — this is happening all the time now, people are looking at Donald Trump’s saying and saying, “This is false. It’s a false claim.” I think people say, “Well, you know what? Hillary Clinton said a lot of things that were false.” I don’t recall the press being quite so concerned about saying that she lied in headlines or in stories like that. The comparison to Clinton is silly. Trump lied far more often, and far more egregiously, than Clinton did. Not only that, unlike Clinton, most of the time Trump’s campaign felt no obligation whatsoever to back up his claims when they were called out as false. And to a far greater degree, Trump would simply continue repeating those lies after they’d been exposed. It is the nature of Trump’s dishonesty — the volume, ostentatiousness, nonchalance, and imperviousness to correction at the hands of factual reality — that became the issue. (See The Post fact-checking team’s deep dive into this phenomenon for all the evidence you need.)
This gets at why Baker’s response is so worrying: It suggests an unwillingness or an inability to entertain the possibility that we may be looking at something new and different here. Take the example that Baker himself chose: Trump’s claim that “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrated 9/11. This was not some casual falsehood — this lie was key to a months-long campaign of vilification and scapegoating of Muslims that in turn was central to his broader appeal. As Glenn Kessler pointed out at the time, Trump repeatedly refused to entertain any evidence to the contrary even when it was directly presented to him. Indeed, his campaign team responded to media efforts to present that contrary evidence by accusing the media of covering up the truth.
In this and many other instances, Trump barely even tried to make a fact-based case for his version of reality. Rather, he seemed to be trying to obliterate any possibility of shared agreement on what constitutes an authoritative source, and even on reality itself.
 DO SOMETHING! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Webpage Design Copyright 2003-2011 http://www.atomicbobs.com/
|