Calling Out a Presidential Lie

People lie. Yes, even presidents lie. Especially presidents, you might argue. And yet there’s a long history in journalism of being very, very careful about saying so.

There are excellent reasons for this standard.

Descriptions like “claimed without evidence,” “falsely said,” and “wrongly asserted” are clunky, but they also avoid explicitly describing intent. Same goes for “untruth,” “falsehood,” and “unsubstantiated claim.” Calling something a “lie” implies that the speaker knows what he said is untrue, and that he meant to deceive. (A similarly classic—and often-broken—rule in journalism is to avoid saying what someone believes. You can describe what they say they believe, the thinking goes, but there’s no way to know what someone actually believes unless you are that person.)

Questioning a sitting president’s truthfulness and actually using the words “lie,” “lied,” or “lying” has often been relegated to the opinion pages, editorials, or put in quotation marks: Let somebody else suggest the chief executive is lying about Yalta, or Cuba, or Vietnam, or trading arms for hostages, or “no new taxes,” or sexual relations with that woman, or weapons of mass destruction. This is the stuff of standard journalistic fairness.

The standard, however, is coming under pressure.

Not just by the bombastic new president of the United States and his famous tendency to exaggerate, but by—and his over-the-top disdain for journalism at a frenetic moment for the media industry.