Trump and ‘The Truth’

A once-upon-a-time voice for journalistic respectability — the Columbia Journalism Review — has consigned to the well-known hot place the notion that respectability entails letting voters rather than reporters decide whether a president is Abe Lincoln or a dirty lying rat. The Review rather leans to the latter conclusion.
The Review’s daily, always (to me) absorbing look at media goings-on raises the question of how to talk about, well, a lying rat of a president: a distinction most media institutions have awarded Donald Trump. The Review highlights the New York Times’ efforts to call Trump a liar without actually calling him one.
“Trump Falsely Says Times Made Up Source in Report on Korea Summit Meeting.” That would be just one example of journalistic efforts to downplay the President’s commitment, such as it is, to the Truth that Makes You Free. The Journalism Review quotes Times White House Reporter Maggie Haberman’s disparaging Tweet the other day: “Trump told two demonstrable falsehoods this AM.”
The Review says “the argument consumed political media conversations on Twitter for much of the weekend.” Some Twitterists thought Haberman’s charge a little mild. On May 28 came the Times’ charge that “He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust.”
Here we go again, trying, as a society, as a culture, to make heads or tails of a president who defies efforts to categorize him. Over the uproar concerning his gift for veracity or falsehood, alarm bells should sound. The anti-Trump media are nuts if they think they’re improving their status in 21stcentury life. They’re undermining it further: deepening national disarray by abandoning standards more necessary than ever before in public life.
May it please the court, reporters and editors have neither right nor duty to show up the president as a liar. It’s lousy journalism to try. But oh, such modern journalism! Which is the problem.
Look: The media are our eyes and ears. Our brains they aren’t, though our media clearly suppo...