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Welcome to Stop the Presses, a weekly newsletter about how right-wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism and what we can do about it.
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.
That’s it for this week! If you enjoyed reading this week’s issue, consider forwarding this email to a friend or colleague. 🙏
Stop the Presses is a product of COURIER, a civic media company.
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