Note: This piece I wrote for Fortune magazine in January of 2017 caused me no end of problems, and looking back I think may have helped lead to my eventual departure from Fortune. The publisher of Fortune, Alan Murray — the man who hired me, along with a group of other Gigaom writers, after Gigaom shut down in 2015 — made it abundantly clear that he did not like this piece at all.
I argued that differences of opinion between columnists and editors are normal, but that if I supported my argument with facts (which I think I did) then it should be allowed to run. He let it be published, but under protest. Not long afterward, he ordered that any piece I wrote that involved Trump had to be approved by him personally before being published. I left Fortune in May.
As expected, Donald Trump’s blatant disregard for accuracy has not moderated itself any now that he has become the 45th president of the United States. In just the last few days, he has made multiple statements that are clearly false, including comments about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and — more importantly — whether millions of people voted illegally.
This behavior has sparked a kind of existential debate within the U.S. news media. How should a news organization respond when the president makes false statements or repeats unsupported claims? Is it ever appropriate to use the word “lie” in such circumstances?
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
It would be nice if there was general agreement on this question, but there isn’t. Some media companies clearly believe that lies should be called what they are — CNN has used the word more than once in its reports on Trump, and even the normally cautious New York Times has shown what appears to be an increasing willingness to call a lie exactly that.
Others believe just as strongly that using the word “lie” is not appropriate unless we know the speaker’s intent. In other words, they argue that you can only call a statement a lie if you know for a fact that the person who said it knew it was false, and said it anyway in a deliberate attempt to deceive or mislead his or her audience.
National Public Radio, for example, said this week that it has chosen not to use the word “lie” in reference to the false or inaccurate statements that President Trump makes, because the intent behind those statements cannot be known.
The dictionary definition of a lie, NPR’s Mary Kelly said, is “a false statement made with intent to deceive. Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was.”
NPR’s senior vice president for news, Michael Oreskes, said the job of journalists is “to report, to find facts, and establish their authenticity and share them with everybody. It’s really important that people understand that these aren’t our opinions. I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”
Earlier this year, Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker made a similar argument, saying the word lie “implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead. 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’re not being objective.”
Both Oreskes and Baker seem concerned in part that calling Trump statements lies will alienate readers and listeners from the mainstream media even more than they already are, and that the only refuge is to stress objectivity as much as possible.
This argument, however, assumes that people will believe an organization is objective and unbiased so long as it uses words like “false” or “inaccurate” or “unsupported” instead of the word “lie.” But there’s no reason to think that this is the case — those who believe the Times is anti-Trump and the Journal is pro-Trump will likely continue to do so regardless.
Meanwhile, media organizations that choose not to call a lie what it is run the risk of being seen as quislings and/or toadies. If a news outlet wants to be seen as a “truth vigilante,” as a New York Times public editor put it once, then how can it not call a lie a lie? If anything could cause a further erosion of trust, surely it’s that.
But what about the idea that we shouldn’t use the word lie unless we know the intent of the speaker? This is a good test — but all it means is that we have to infer intent based on what is known, or what a person can reasonably be expected to know. It’s similar to the legal test for a false statement, which requires a “willful disregard” for the truth.
In a nutshell, a statement is a lie if there is abundant evidence to the contrary that a speaker should have known about. So, for example, saying the inauguration drew record crowds is clearly a lie, since there are photos and credible news reports that prove this to be untrue. At the time of the inauguration, this might have been a misunderstanding, but now it has hardened into a lie.
In exactly the same way, the president’s comments about voter fraud are arguably a bald-faced lie. Press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump “believes what he believes” — but all of the available evidence is that those reports are factually incorrect, and that there was virtually zero voter fraud. Based on the willful disregard benchmark, then, repeatedly saying there was fraud qualifies as a lie.
Obviously, there are statements that can’t be proven to be true that don’t deserve to be called lies. If President Trump says that the New York Mets are the best team that ever played baseball, that falls under the category of opinion — as it would if he said Snickers is the best candy bar, or Mariah Carey is the best singer. Calling those lies serves no purpose,
But when the leader of one of the world’s most powerful countries deliberately repeats statements about the reliability of the voting process despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that isn’t just an opinion — it is a lie. And we should call it that, or we are not doing a service either to our readers or to the country as a whole.
People do and his supporters just don’t seem to care. 🤷♀️
Good data point plotting our descent.