SOMEONE SHOULD TELL TRUMP: “YOU MAKE FALSE STATEMENTS WITH THE INTENT TO MISLEAD.”

…Trump falsely swearing that thousands of people in New Jersey were applauding the fall of the Twin Towers

 

Trump continues to tell his lies, even though he has been shown that they were falsehoods.

 

I find it interesting that someone writing for the media has asked the question, “Will the media actually call out the new GOP president on his lack of honesty since he is apparently going to continue employing the unprecedented dishonesty that he offered up during the election campaign?”

 

One other media individual actually had the gall to ask: “When Donald Trump lies, is he actually telling a lie if we cannot prove his intent to mislead?”

 

For this individual I think they need to spend some time with Google and with Webster’s Dictionary.  One of the definitions of telling a “lie, is the telling of a statement with the intent to mislead”.

 

But from what I’ve been reading, the early returns in this debate are not encouraging. In fact, they suggest that those in the news media may be totally unprepared for the challenges the Trump presidency will pose to all media.  It is becoming very clear that so far, news organizations are helping Trump’s use his un-verified claims which eventually result in the exact headlines that Trump desires.

 

On “Meet the Press,” the host, Chuck Todd pressed the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editor in chief, Gerard Baker on whether his paper would call out Trump’s lies for what they are?  (Other news orgs have finally started doing this with more regularity.) 

 

Baker’s response is worth quoting in full, because it should go into a time capsule for future generations to ponder what happened in this country at the outset of the 21st century:

 

Per Gerald Baker.....and this is the whole quote:

 

“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 it applies — that 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.”

 

First of all, to compare the list of “lies” from Hillary with those of Trump is totally bogus.  The comparison has to be at least 10 of Trump’s falsehoods for every one of Hillary’s, and I’m being very generous for Trump.  (One major fact checking organization has published that during Trump’s campaign, he stated a falsehood every 3.5 seconds he talked or was being interviewed.)  And that doesn’t even come close to the severity of his lies.  What did Hillary ever say that came close to the one whopper from Trump about those thousands of people in New Jersey applauding the fall of the 9/11 Twin Towers?

 

Even the Fact Checkers at the major papers said that every day it was a marathon race just to keep up with the false statements from Donald Trump during the campaign.

 

The truth is, that Trump is impervious to fact checkers.  He has proven that he will just continue to restate the same lies and he has repeatedly refused to entertain any evidence to the contrary, even when the proof was directly presented to him.

 

In the New Jersey / Twin-Towers lie, Trump barely tried to make a fact-based case for his version of that reality.  He instead tried to obliterate any possibility of a shared agreement on what constituted an authoritative source, and even on the reality of the lie itself.

 

The proof of this is with his biggest and longest-term lie.  That was his racist Obama birther claim. Trump himself conceived of the lie as a means of his entree into the political consciousness of the GOP primary voters. Even though it was debunked countless times over 5 years, Trump kept his birther campaign going anyway.

 

According to the WSJ Editor, Baker, there must be a provable intent to mislead.  But what do you do if Trump continues to tell his lies, even though it has been demonstrated to him that they were falsehoods?

 

If we don’t call out Trump for “lying,” or if we don’t squarely label these claims as “false,” don’t we all risk allowing Trump to obliterate the possibility of an agreement on the true reality?

Aren’t we already seeing a preview of how this will work in practice when Trump is president. On multiple occasions, Trump has claimed credit for jobs he has supposedly “saved,” and the headlines have tended to reflect his claims without informing readers that those claims are un-verified and open to doubt.

 

Trump knows that people don’t always take the time to learn the true details. Even when they do, if the news organizations don’t take a very clear stand on what is true and what isn’t, confusion will and does follow.  This has been shown to be the case with Trump, time, after time, after time.

 

At least, the New York Times, (You know, the newspaper sometimes called "America's Newspaper" that Trump incorrectly says will be gone in 2 years.), the editor Dean Baquet seems to have the right idea.  He says we must point out and label Trump’s lies as such, because Trump has shown a willingness to go beyond the “normal sort of obfuscation that some politicians will traffic in.”

 

Writer Masha Gessen of the NYR Daily has gone even further, suggesting that Trump’s approach to information, or disinformation, looks like “a hallmark of Putinesque autocratic rule”.  This is the autocrat Trump trying to “assert power over truth itself,” and he conveys the message that his “power lies in being able to say whatever he wants.”  (Regardless of whether it’s true)  We don’t yet know if this will prove an accurate description of Trump’s approach as President. But given the authoritarian tendencies we’ve already seen from Trump, it seems like we should at least be on guard for this possibility

 

The point is that taking an approach such as stated by the WSJ would continue to let Trump be Trump.  It will be very risky if the media continues to allow Trump to lie with no one calling his bluff over and over again and again. 

 

But does the media have the Cojones to do just that?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017