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What Journalists Can Do When The President Is A Liar

What Journalists Can Do When The President Is A Liar

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

When Donald Trump is inaugurated later this month, the presidency will officially be held by an inveterate liar. And the way the press has covered Trump in the two months since his November election victory suggests that many journalists need to adjust their approach to address that reality before Trump takes office.

On New Year’s Eve, Trump cast doubt on the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian government-backed hackers intervened in the presidential election, suggesting that he would release evidence to the contrary early this week.

“I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove,” Trump told the press pool outside his Florida golf club. “So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.” Asked what precisely he knew that others didn’t, Trump responded, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Trump’s comments promptly rocketed through the news cycle, with outlets reprinting his claims without skepticism or context. In a representative example, The New York Times’ report was headlined “Trump Promises a Revelation on Hacking.” But by Monday morning, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer was walking back the suggestion that Trump would release any new information this week.

The president-elect’s claim to have new information about Russian hacking was certainly startling. But why did journalists initially treat it as news and assume it must be true?

Journalists typically treat presidential statements as both newsworthy and generally trustworthy until proven otherwise. Trump is hardly the first president to dissimulate. But unlike his predecessors, Trump does not lie strategically or rarely. He lies habitually, on matters great and small. By following their typical practice and reporting the president-elect’s comments as both factual and significant, reporters are doing a disservice to their audience, which is left with the impression that what Trump has said is both true and substantive.

Sometimes, Trump is simply misstating the facts, as he did in touting a jobs “deal” with Carrier that won’t actually save the jobs he promised and one with Sprint that he had nothing to do with. Sometimes, he is promoting false conspiracy theories, as he did when he claimed that “millions of people” illegally voted in the election. Sometimes, he continues repeating the same claims after they have been proved false — as he did with regard to President Obama’s birth certificate — making it clear that he is lying deliberately. And when pressed by the media to explain dubious claims, he often promises explosive new information that never materializes in attempts to delay difficult confrontations, as he has done with his refusal to release his tax returns after originally saying he would, his response to questions about his business conflicts, and his comments about hacking.

Trump is exploiting a vulnerability in journalism. The pace of reporting has accelerated to the point where it is standard practice for journalists to write up a prominent politician’s comments immediately, and assess what those comments mean in later pieces. That doesn’t work with Trump.

When Trump offers a statement, the press writes up his comments with headlines and stories favorable to the president-elect only to, almost inevitably, discover after additional reporting that Trump’s initial claims were false. Readers and viewers are misled by the initial coverage and are left unable to accurately judge the policy implications of Trump’s remarks. Millions of Americans end up supporting Trump’s jobs “deals” following misleading early reports, or believing his lies about illegal voters.

Or Trump will respond to a burgeoning controversy by promising to release documents or give press conferences that support his positions. Reporters will treat that declaration of forthcoming news as itself newsworthy, but the promise is ultimately unfulfilled. Trump succeeds in muddying the waters and shifting the news cycle.

Journalists are aware that Trump’s statements are less trustworthy than those of other politicians. Major news outlets and fact-checkers that reviewed Trump’s campaign statements have stated in the strongest terms that Trump spews falsehoods at an unprecedented rate for American politics.

The New York Times even took the unusual step of declaring in a front-page headline that Trump’s statements about President Obama’s birth certificate were a “lie.” Times Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet explained that Trump’s behavior had required the paper to change its approach and accurately describe Trump’s “demonstrably false” statements as lies.

He was right. But Trump’s behavior has not changed since his election, so journalists cannot allow themselves to return to their usual approach to presidential coverage; rather, they must develop new methods to avoid privileging his lies.

Since Trump frequently lies, journalists should be extremely wary of headlines and social media posts that simply restate his comments. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent suggests two smart rules of thumb: “If the headline does not convey the fact that Trump’s claim is in question or open to doubt, based on the known facts, then it is insufficiently informative,” and, “If the known facts show that his claims are false or outright lies, the headline should clearly indicate that, too.”

Given the need to vet Trump’s comments, Poynter’s Kelly McBride urges reporters to slow down and prioritize providing context for his statements over publishing Trump’s remarks quickly. That seems especially worthwhile when Trump is promising to provide information about a controversy some time in the future.

Journalists must also be willing to call Trump’s statements lies where appropriate. If they don’t, as Sargent warns, “we risk enabling Trump’s apparent efforts to obliterate the possibility of agreement on shared reality.”

Moreover, in cases where Trump is clearly lying, reporters should not privilege the lie by adopting the false claim as the basis of their report and framing it as a question of whether his statement was accurate. That approach helps Trump spread the false claim and leaves readers and viewers with the takeaway that there is a controversy around his comments. They should instead frame their stories — including their headlines — around the reality that the president-elect is not telling the truth, explaining that this latest claim is part of a pattern. That method punishes the falsehood and provides the best chance of leaving the audience with the truth.

Some journalists will oppose the need for such shifts in approach because they are worried about the optics of seeming overly critical of the president.

Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker championed this position in a Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. Asked if his paper would be willing to refer to some inaccurate Trump statements as lies, Baker said it would not use that word because “I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective.”

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, this approach suggests that Baker believes it is not “objectivity that matters, but the *appearance* of objectivity.” Dan Rather wrote of the “deeply disturbing” comments: “It is not the proper role of journalists to meet lies — especially from someone of Mr. Trump’s stature and power — by hiding behind semantics and euphemisms. Our role is to call it as we see it, based on solid reporting. When something is, in fact, a demonstrable lie, it is our responsibility to say so.”

Baker isn’t alone. There is an ongoing debate in newsrooms about whether to accurately call Trump a liar — even at the Times, which did so back in September. At the time, public editor Liz Spayd agreed that the paper was justified in using such language to refer to Trump’s birther lies, but warned that “The Times should use this term rarely” because “its power in political warfare has so freighted the word that its mere appearance on news pages, however factually accurate, feels partisan.” Again, that’s an argument that optics outweigh accurate information.

Spayd appears to have won the argument. While the paper’s editorial board and columnists still regularly refer to Trump as a liar and call his statements lies, the Times’ news section has done so only twice since Spayd’s piece came out — both times in articles that referenced Trump’s birther lies, which were published the same week.

Trump didn’t stop lying in September. But if the press doesn’t incorporate the lessons of the campaign and refuses to treat his statements with skepticism and call them out as lies when appropriate, its audience will pay the price.

IMAGE: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump delivered brief remarks to reporters at the Mar-a-lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. December 28, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Paranoia Is On The Rise In American Politics

Paranoia Is On The Rise In American Politics

The cult classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is among my favorite films. Released in 1964, it’s a brilliant satire of a certain paranoid period in recent American history.

It was a time when fears of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union infused politics with a sense of doom; when the Joseph McCarthys of the country ruined the lives of civil servants and Hollywood entertainers with baseless charges of treason; and when the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society unleashed a campaign decrying the fluoridation of water as a communist plot.

As Strangelove‘s Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper put it, “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?” Played by Sterling Hayden, Ripper was unforgettable.

Yet, I may not have fallen in love with the movie if I had understood it less as history and more as a foreshadowing of our current crazy times. If I had first seen Strangelove just after an armed madman entered a Washington, D.C., pizzeria to rescue children supposedly held in a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton — “news” gleaned from disinformation, or “fake news,” sites — I may have found the film alarming instead of funny.

It seems we are in the throes of another of those periods when the “paranoid style in American politics,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in a groundbreaking essay, is ascendant. No nefarious act, no multilayered conspiracy, is too bizarre, too complex or too ridiculous for some to believe.

Comet Ping Pong, a neighborhood pizza joint in northwest Washington where I’ve eaten once or twice, has become the target of determined propagandists spreading the laughably preposterous (and utterly false) claim that Clinton and John Podesta, her campaign manager, are operating a child sex ring out of its basement. For months now, the eatery’s owner and its employees have been subjected to death threats launched on social media as the kooky theory has ricocheted across the internet. The lunacy reached its zenith a few days ago, when a heavily armed Edgar Welch allegedly traveled from his North Carolina home to “self-investigate” the claims and rescue any enslaved children.

During the same week, Lucy Richards, a Tampa, Florida, woman, was charged with making death threats to the father of one of the children slain in the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. Richards is among those who insist that the massacre was a hoax staged by liberals to further the cause of gun control.

Her target was Lenny Pozner, whose son, 6-year-old Noah, was killed on that horrific day. Pozner has dedicated himself to exposing the liars who claim he never had a son to be murdered by a psychopath, so he has earned their ire. (Try to imagine the agony of a father who still grieves for his young son but who must now also put up with these maniacs.)

Hofstadter’s essay was published in 1964, the same year that Strangelove was released, but it reads like an analysis of our current hysterical age. “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. … This term is pejorative, and it is meant to be: The paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good,” he wrote.

Donald Trump, who introduced himself on the national political stage by insisting that President Barack Obama was a foreign-born usurper, is a master of the art of the paranoid style. Indeed, even in victory, he and his minions continue to fan the flames of hysteria, using social media to spread distortions and outright lies. Perhaps it shouldn’t be any surprise that there are some who run about as if their hair were on fire, seeing networks of secret schemers out to destroy the country.

But if anybody is apt to destroy democracy, it’s the lunatics who cast aside obvious facts, preferring to indulge the most far-fetched scenarios as hidden truths. Their resistance to reality could render the country ungovernable.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

IMAGE: Sterling Hayden as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

#EndorseThis: Giuliani Eviscerated By Chris Matthews On Birther Claims

#EndorseThis: Giuliani Eviscerated By Chris Matthews On Birther Claims

According to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Republican nominee Donald Trump has accepted that President Obama was born in the United States. Giuliani claims Trump established this belief several years ago — a claim that POLITICO could not substantiate.

Giuliani appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC Thursday and was asked about Trump’s birther claims. In response, he said “Donald Trump believes now that (Obama) was born in the United States.”

“I confirm that,” Giuliani said. “And Donald Trump now confirms that.”

This portion of the interview was purely false, as Trump has never confirmed that he believes Obama was born in the States. In fact, all he recently said to Bill O’Reilly on the topic was that he doesn’t “talk about it anymore.” Matthews pushed back at Giuliani on this point, and as he did, Giuliani attempted to shift the focus of the interview, claiming Hillary Clinton’s campaign originally brought up the birther issue.

“Where did they do that?” Matthews asked.

After some back and forth, Giuliani softened on his rhetoric: “I believe (Trump) picked up on what Hillary Clinton’s campaign said. He pushed Obama. Obama finally produced the birth certificate and it showed he was born in Hawaii. Therefore he’s an American citizen.”

The claim that Hillary Clinton’s camp first brought up birtherism has been fact checked before and found to be false.

Matthews pressed Giuliani on whether he had any specific conversations with Trump about the issue and whether he could speak for Trump. Giuliani’s response was, “As per Donald Trump — he has told me that he is proud of the fact that he finally got Obama to produce his birth certificate.”

Earlier in the interview, Matthews noted that Trump had not even accepted the birth certificate as the final word on Obama’s legitimacy.

After Giuliani began laughing, Matthews chided him again: “I don’t think this is funny. I think when you accuse the president of the United States of being someone who snuck in the country and assumed an identity, because that’s what Trump has been doing for years now.”

Watch the full video below:


Photo and video via MSNBC/Media Matters Of America

Birtherism: Trump’s Original Sin And The Media’s Latest One

Birtherism: Trump’s Original Sin And The Media’s Latest One

Republished with permission from Media Matters. 

Next time you watch the news, do me a favor. Take a look at the reporters’ arms. Do they seem tired to you? Overworked? They have to be a little sore at least. Such is the vigor with which the media have been patting themselves on the back lately.

After a full year of the Trump steamroller — in which a honey-baked ham with authoritarian inclinations has managed to blow past any serious questioning of his policies or candidacy — the media apparently feel that they’re now doing their jobs.

You could see it a few weeks back in the breathless praise for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews when he interrogated Trump on abortion; or in the hype around the New York Times interview that nailed down Trump’s Strangelovian approach to nuclear weapons; or even in Trump’s recent pivot toward a more “presidential” tone. Among reporters and critics that I know, there’s a growing sentiment that Trump is changing his ways because they, the press, are taking him seriously now. They’re handling Trump not based on the job he has (obnoxious reality star) but on the job he wants (president or, perhaps, generalissimo).

Call me crazy, but I’m not totally buying this notion. I think it’s a crock. The media haven’t “done their job” with regard to Trump, and the reason why is very simple: The press have largely ignored the issue that made him a political phenomenon in the first place.

The media have overlooked Trump’s birtherism.

I’m a Catholic. I’ve seen enough baptismal water spilled to fill William Taft’s bathtub ten times over. But it doesn’t take a Catholic like me to understand the original sin of the Trump candidacy. His first act on the political stage was to declare himself the head of the birther movement. For Trump, the year 2011 began with the BIG NEWS that he had rejected Lindsay Lohan for Celebrity Apprentice, but by April, his one-man show to paint Barack Obama as a secret Kenyan had become the talk of the country. Five years later, Trump is nearing the Republican nomination for president.

In many ways, birtherism is the thing that launched Trump’s campaign. But as he nears the big prize in Cleveland, Trump has refused disavow his conspiracy theory. In July, when Anderson Cooper pressed Trumpon whether President Obama was, in fact, born in the United States, Trump’s response was, “I really don’t know.”

I’m taxing my mind to find a historical comparison here, to put this in context. I suppose Trump’s birtherism is the intellectual equivalent of the flat-earth theory; both are fully contradicted by the evidence. But then again, there is a difference between the two, and the difference is this: If a presidential candidate insisted that theUSS Theodore Roosevelt would fall off the edge of the map after sailing past Catalina, Wolf Blitzer would probably ask him about it.

It’s been nine months since Cooper pressed Trump on the issue of whether he thinks the president is an American — almost enough time, as Trump might put it, to carry a baby to term in Kenya and secretly transport him to Hawaii — and still, no one has gotten an answer. In fact, most have stopped asking. It’s now known among reporters that Obama’s birthplace is a strictly verboten topic for Trump. If you bring up the subject, as Chris Matthews did in December, Trump looks at you with a glare I assume he otherwise reserves for undocumented immigrants and say, “I don’t talk about that anymore.”

Since July, there have been 12 debates, six televised forums, and enough cable interviews to combust a DVR, but the only “birther” issue extensively covered in the press has involved whether Sen. Ted Cruz was born in Calgary Flames territory. Most reporters don’t seem to want to piss off the The Donald and risk losing their access.

Look, I understand that there’s plenty of craziness to investigate in our politics. Cruz believes that global warming is a hoax. Ben Carson claimed that the Biblical Joseph built the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Heck, once upon a time, George W. Bush famously thought the jury was out on evolution.

But Trump’s birtherism is far, far more important — for two reasons:

First, in my experience, when a politician says he doesn’t talk about an issue, that’s precisely the issue you should ask him about.

Second, there’s another difference between being birther and flat-earther. It’s possible to believe the Earth is flat and not be a bigot, but it’s impossible to be a birther and not be one.

It’s no surprise Trump’s campaign has been a parade of racism after his foray into birtherism — a border wall, a ban on Muslim immigration, and the failure to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike Bush’s creationism and Carson’s historical idiocy, Trump’s birtherism can’t be written off as a minor policy quirk. It’s less of a bug than a feature. Trump, by his own admission, sees the controversy over Obama’s birthplace as foundational to his brand and instructive to how he approaches politics. When ABC asked him about his aggressive birtherism in 2013, he said, “I don’t think I went overboard. Actually, I think it made me very popular… I do think I know what I’m doing.”

I think it made me very popular… I do think I know what I’m doing.

With birtherism, Trump discovered a sad truth about modern American media: Bigotry gets you attention. And long as you bring viewers, readers, and clicks, the fourth estate will let you get away with that bigotry.

* * *

Long before Donald Trump, there was another demagogue, Huey Long, who made a run for the White House. Long was fictionalized and immortalized as the character Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s novel, All The King’s Men, in which Warren wrote, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.”

So, too, was Trump’s political career.

The press should get their hands off their backs and ask him about it.

Photo: CNN.