THERE’S LIES, AND THEN ...
A reporter’s challenge in calling out, um, falsehoods. Daniel Dale,
I fact-check everything U.S. President Donald Trump says.
Every week, the Star posts my updated list of Trump’s false claims.
And then, every week, at least one Trump opponent scolds me for calling them false claims.
“LIES!!!!! CALL THEM LIES, GOD DAMMIT!!!” one man, Devin Comiskey, tweeted to me in mid-May. “Why do people continue to whitewash what he does?”
Comiskey’s call-them-lies plea gained momentum on Twitter last weekend. Hundreds of liberals, including celebrities such as John Cusack and Chrissy Teigen, criticized a prominent New York Times reporter, Maggie Haberman, for calling two of Trump’s latest false claims “demonstrable falsehoods” rather than “lies.”
I called those two claims “lies.” (One a “ridiculous lie,” one a “big lie.”) Over my 19 months of fact-checking almost every word out of Trump’s mouth or Twitter feed, I’ve used “lie” to describe dozens of other Trump claims.
I’ve quoted a historian saying Trump is the biggest liar in the history of the presidency. I’ve said that I personally think the president is a serial liar.
I also don’t think that “lie” should be the word we use for every one of his inaccurate statements. And I don’t think reporters should be blamed or shamed for choosing different words where appropriate.
A lie is a false statement made intentionally. (Merriam-Webster: “Lie, verb: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”) In some cases, it’s safe to say Trump is intentionally trying to deceive. In other cases, it’s far less clear that he’s being wrong intentionally — because, with Donald Trump, you regularly can’t rule out the possibility that he is confused or ignorant.
If we journalists are going to present ourselves as arbiters of truth, we have to stick to what we know is true. And that means not calling something a lie when we don’t have a reasonable certainty that Trump’s intention is deception.
What does that mean in practice? It means choosing our terminology — “lie,” “false claim” and “falsehood,” “misleading,” and so on — on a case-by-case basis.
Making the right decision case-by-case means, in my opinion, that “lie” should be used a lot more than almost every major U.S. news outlet currently uses it. It is obvious that there are numerous instances in which Trump is lying. In these obvious instances, I share the frustration of people like Comiskey with other reporters’ reluctance to say the word that is plainly appropriate.
Trump clearly lied when he said in April that “millions and millions” of people, in “many places, like California,” illegally vote more than once in the same election. There is no basis whatsoever for this claim.
Trump clearly lied when he said in March that Conor Lamb, the Democratic candidate in a House race in Pennsylvania, had proclaimed, “I love the tax cuts.”
In fact, Lamb had campaigned against these Trump tax cuts.
Trump clearly lied when he said in July that he got a “call from the head of the Boy Scouts” to praise his controversial speech to a scout event. As the White House was later forced to admit, there was no phone call at all.
Trump clearly lied when he said at a presidential debate in 2016, that Muslim associates of the perpetrators of the terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., “saw the bombs all over the apartment” and didn’t call the police. Simply didn’t happen. And Trump is not only lying when he makes up a supposed event out of thin air. He is also lying when he uses wildly inaccurate numbers. But some words are more appropriate than “lie” in other cases in which the intent is harder to discern.
At a rally in Michigan in April, Trump proclaimed, “This is the state where Henry Ford invented the assembly line.” Ford did not invent the assembly line: it was pioneered in the Michigan auto industry by Ransom Eli Olds. Did Trump intentionally lie about auto history for some odd reason, or did he or his speech writers just read this popular misconception about Ford somewhere? I’m inclined to think it was the latter. When Trump mused, at a press conference with Finland’s president, that “Finland has been free of Russia” for “100 years,” was he lying, or was he just unaware that Finland fought wars with the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, not even 80 years prior? I think it’s quite likely Donald Trump is not very familiar with Finnish history, so I play it safe and call that a false claim, too.
When Trump says the U.S. has 32,000 soldiers in South Korea, is he lying, or is he misremembering last year’s correct number, 23,635 active troops? I’m just not sure about that either.
And when he says he has cut more regulations than even the president who served for “16 years,” is he intentionally exaggerating the length of the longest presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 12-year tenure, or did he hear that Roosevelt was elected four times and not know that Roosevelt died early in his fourth term? Either one is possible; I’m inclined to guess he’s being intentional.
But I’m a reporter, and I can’t guess when calling someone a liar, so I use “false claim.”
The thing is: it’s bad whether it’s intentional or unintentional, a false claim or a lie. When I defend my use of “false claim” by pointing out that Trump might be confused or ignorant, some scoffing critics will ask: and that’s somehow better?
It’s not. Calling a claim false isn’t an attempt to excuse it.
It’s not good that the president deliberately utters inaccurate things.
It’s also not good that the president so frequently utters inaccurate things because he doesn’t know what he is talking about.