The lying game
Media should tell the truth about who lies most
We can be fairly sure that in Monday’s presidential debate Donald Trump will lie repeatedly and grotesquely, and Hillary Clinton might say a couple of untrue things. Or not.
What we don’t know is whether the moderator will step in when Mr. Trump delivers one of his 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? If he says America is the world’s most highly taxed country — which it isn’t — will anyone other than Ms. Clinton say it isn’t? And will media coverage after the debate convey the asymmetry of what went down?
We now have long track records for both Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton, and, thanks to nonpartisan factchecking operations like PolitiFact, we can even quantify the difference. Poli-tiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and ranked them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling.
Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Ms. Clinton six; the GOP nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27. Unless one candidate has a nervous breakdown or a religious conversion this weekend, the debate will follow similar lines. So how should it be reported?
Media can’t report at length on every questionable statement — time, space and the attention of readers and viewers are limited. I suggest that reporters and news organizations treat time and attention span as a sort of capital budget that must be allocated across coverage.
When businesses must allocate capital, they 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 mean devoting coverage to statements whose dishonesty rises above a certain level of outrageousness — say, outright falsity with no redeeming grain of truth.
If the debate looks anything like the campaign so far, we know that will result in news analyses that devote five times as much space to Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as to Ms. Clinton’s.
If you say, “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.
I am not calling on news media to take a side; I’m just asking them to report what is actually happening, without regard to party. Any reporting that doesn’t accurately reflect the huge honesty gap between the candidates is misleading, and provides a distorted picture that favors the biggest liar.
There are, of course, intense pressures on news media to engage in that distortion. Point out a Trump lie and you get some amazing mail. Setting aside the attacks on your race or ethnic group, it will include accusations that you are a traitor, and most of it will say you are a bad journalist because you don’t criticize both candidates equally.
One common response to such attacks involves abdicating responsibility for fact-checking entirely, and replacing it with theater criticism: Never mind whether what the candidate said is true or false, how did it play? How did he or she “come across”? But real reporting should tell the public what really happened, not speculate about how other people might react to what happened.
Now, what will I say if Mr. Trump lies less than I predict and Ms. Clinton more? That’s easy: Tell it like it is.
But don’t grade on a curve. If Mr. Trump lies only three times as much as Ms. Clinton, 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.