A 10,000 lie record- media must be the arbiters of truth
Was the Titanic "delayed"? No! It sunk. When Trump tells lies, the statements are not "inaccurate". Opinion by Leonard Pitts.
This echo opinion by Leonard Pitts was published in the Daily Commercial a Florida newspaper. Americans must support the media in holding Donald Trump accountable for his inability to speak truth.
Ten thousand.
Feels like there ought to be a statue, or something. And what does Trump lie about? Pretty much everything.
He lies about the border wall, claiming it is now being built. It isn’t.
He lies about his tax cut, claiming it was the biggest in history. It wasn’t.
He lies about the Mueller report, claiming it exonerates him. It doesn’t.
Indeed, the very same weekend he notched his dubious milestone, Trump told a particularly gruesome whopper about supposed legislation empowering a new mother and her doctor to “determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
And how did The New York Times respond to this flaming canard? It called it “inaccurate,” which raised something of a stink on Twitter. That’s not surprising. Calling that hogwash “inaccurate” is like saying the Titanic was “delayed.”
The Times is not alone; most news organizations have resisted calling Trump’s lies lies. Their reasoning, it must be conceded, is thoughtful. After all, to call something a lie is to impose judgment. Sometimes, when people are incorrect it’s not a lie, only a mistake.
But 10,000 times in a little over two years? How gullible must you be to believe someone could be that wrong that often by accident? If any other man told you half that many untruths, you’d call him a liar. You wouldn’t hesitate. Yet here, we do.
It sets an extraordinary precedent, yes, for a news organization to brand a president a liar. But these are extraordinary times and a liar, brazen and inveterate, is precisely what Trump is. In their refusal to call him that, in their insistence upon giving him the benefit of nonexistent doubt, news media compromise their prime directive, which is to present a picture of the world as it is.
That’s something we can ill afford with the very idea of truth under attack and the need for news media to do their jobs arguably more critical than ever.
This is a time for forthrightness, yet too often journalists are anything but, from coverage of race, to climate change to this, as the newspaper of record dubs a grotesque lie merely “inaccurate.”
It makes you wonder if all the effort conservatives put into neutering the referees was not a waste of time.
Seems the referees have done a fair job of neutering themselves.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald
And how did The New York Times respond to this flaming canard? It called it “inaccurate,” which raised something of a stink on Twitter. That’s not surprising. Calling that hogwash “inaccurate” is like saying the Titanic was “delayed.”
The Times is not alone; most news organizations have resisted calling Trump’s lies lies. Their reasoning, it must be conceded, is thoughtful. After all, to call something a lie is to impose judgment. Sometimes, when people are incorrect it’s not a lie, only a mistake.
But 10,000 times in a little over two years? How gullible must you be to believe someone could be that wrong that often by accident? If any other man told you half that many untruths, you’d call him a liar. You wouldn’t hesitate. Yet here, we do.
It sets an extraordinary precedent, yes, for a news organization to brand a president a liar. But these are extraordinary times and a liar, brazen and inveterate, is precisely what Trump is. In their refusal to call him that, in their insistence upon giving him the benefit of nonexistent doubt, news media compromise their prime directive, which is to present a picture of the world as it is.
That’s something we can ill afford with the very idea of truth under attack and the need for news media to do their jobs arguably more critical than ever.
This is a time for forthrightness, yet too often journalists are anything but, from coverage of race, to climate change to this, as the newspaper of record dubs a grotesque lie merely “inaccurate.”
It makes you wonder if all the effort conservatives put into neutering the referees was not a waste of time.
Seems the referees have done a fair job of neutering themselves.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald
Labels: Donald Trump, Leonard Pitts, The New York Times, The Washington Post
posted by Juliana L'Heureux | 4:31 AM
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