In The Plum Line Paul Waldman notes a weakness in how the press operates these days:
Yet when he makes false charges about others, as he regularly does, they’re given what is functionally the same respect as any other statement, to be passed on and repeated until concrete evidence emerges to prove they’re false.
Trump understands all this perfectly well. As he once told his then-toady Billy Bush when Bush called him out (privately) for lying about how great the ratings for “The Apprentice” were: “People will just believe you. You just tell them, and they believe you.”
While this is something that should concern us each and every day, we need to be particularly on guard when the 2020 election begins. Trump is going to run a scorched-earth campaign against the Democratic nominee, not just of sneering ridicule but also of innuendo and outright slander. One way we can prepare for it is to stop treating the lies Trump tells — such as putting out false letters about his medical condition — as though they’re anything less than the scandal they ought to be.
There’s a need, I think, to differentiate news stories into three categories: news with assertions verified as true (“facts”), news stories with assertions proven to be false (“lies”), and news stories where the status of the assertions is uncertain. The first should be candidates for being reported, the second should either be discarded or held up as examples of lies, and the third should be held until the status of the assertions are verified.
Too bad that’ll never happen. “Scoops” are far too important in the press culture, and not without good reason. But the fact that a celebrity, or candidate, has opened his or her mouth and flapped their tongue about is not automatically news.
