Time to take a closer look at the game of lies

If Trump lies only three times as much as Hillary in today’s debate, the main story should still be that he lied a lot more than she did

ere’s what we can be fairly sure will happen in today’s presidential debate in the United States: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will lie repeatedly and grotesquely, on a variety of subjects. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton might say a couple of untrue things. Or she may not.

Here’s what we don’t know: Will the moderators step in when Trump delivers one of his well-known, often reiterated falsehoods? If he claims, yet again, to have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning — which he didn’t — will he be called on it? If he claims to have renounced birtherism years ago, will the moderators note that he was still at it just a few months ago? (In fact, he already seems to be walking back his admission last week that US President Barack Obama was indeed born in America.) If he says one more time that America is the world’s most highly taxed country — which it isn’t — will anyone other than Hillary say that it isn’t? And will media coverage after the debate convey the asymmetry of what went down?

You may ask how I can be sure that one candidate will be so much more dishonest than the other. The answer is that at this point we have long track records for both Trump and Hillary — thanks to nonpartisan fact-checking operations like PolitiFact, we can even quantify the difference.

PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Hillary statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire”. One might quibble with some of the judgements, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling. Trump had 48 “Pants on Fire” ratings, Hillary just six; the GOP nominee had 89 “False” ratings, the Democrat 27.

Unless one candidate has a nervous breakdown or a religious conversion in the next few days, the debate will follow similar lines. So how should it be reported?

Let’s take it as a given that one can’t report at length on every questionable statement a candidate makes — time, space and the attention of readers and viewers are all limited. What I suggest is that reporters and news organisations treat time and attention span as a sort of capital budget that must be allocated across coverage.

What businesses do when they must allocate capital is to establish a “hurdle rate”, a minimum rate of return a project must offer if it is to be undertaken. In terms of reporting falsehoods, this would amount to devoting on-air time or column inches to statements whose dishonesty rises above a certain level of outrageousness — say, outright falsity with no redeeming grain of truth. In terms of PolitiFact’s ratings, this may correspond to statements that are “False” or “Pants on Fire”.

Intense pressures

And if the debate looks anything like the campaign so far, we know what that will mean: A news analysis that devotes at least five times as much space to Trump’s falsehoods as to Hillary’s. If your reaction is, “Oh, they can’t do that — it would look like partisan bias,” you have just demonstrated the huge problem with news coverage during this election. For I am not calling on the media to take a side; I’m just calling on it to report what is actually happening, without regard for party.

Yet there are, of course, intense pressures on the media to engage in that distortion. Point out a Trump lie and you will get some pretty amazing mail — and if we set aside the attacks on your race or ethnic group, accusations that you are a traitor, etc., most of it will declare that you are being a bad journalist because you don’t criticise both candidates equally.

One all-too-common response to such attacks involves abdicating responsibility for fact-checking entirely, and replacing it with theatre criticism: Never mind whether what the candidate said is true or false, how did it play? How did he or she “come across”? What were the “optics”?

But theatre criticism is the job of theatre critics; news reporting should tell the public what really happened, not be devoted to speculation about how other people might react to what happened.

Now, what will I say if Trump lies less than I predict and Hillary more? That’s easy: Tell it like it is. But don’t grade on a curve. If Trump lies only three times as much as Hillary, the main story should still be that he lied a lot more than she did, not that he wasn’t quite as bad as expected.

Again, I’m not calling on the news media to take sides; journalists should simply do their job, which is to report the facts. It may not be easy — but doing the right thing rarely is.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and distinguished professor in the Graduate Centre Economics PhD programme and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Centre at the City University of New York.

www.gulfnews.com/opinions