If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is four — because calling a tail a leg does not make it so. That, in short, is both a lesson and a challenge for contemporary journalism.
The Trump Administration proudly shares video of our destruction of small boats in the Caribbean, killing all persons on them. Trump officials claim all were smuggling drugs. That untested claim then is extrapolated as a reason to: ignore international law; skip the legal steps of Coast Guard boarding, seizing, charging; and building an argument that our nation is at war with drug cartels—likely a fig leaf for attacks on Venezuela, even though other nations are more prolific in sending illegal drugs into the U. S. With rare exceptions, journalists do not challenge this nonsense. Those who do are assailed by Trump acolytes who claim they clearly are soft on drug cartels.
Congress struggles through a shutdown. Republicans on Capitol Hill falsely claim that Democrats are seeking to extend health care benefits to illegal aliens. President Trump even takes to social media to post manipulated images of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero. Many major news organizations pushed back on both the falsity and the juvenile post, but several did not.
The Trump Administration claims unprecedented authority to make and modify tariffs, deploy the military in American cities, and scoff at the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause as Trump and his family rake in money from government-connected grifting.
Trump insists that his hires adhere to a trio of false claims: that he was not assisted in the 2016 campaign by Russian interference, that he actually won the 2020 election, and that the numerous prosecutions of him (including one that yielded guilty verdicts on 34 felony charges) all were illegitimate. These solidly debunked claims are a nefarious trilogy that serve as a pretext to his political prosecutions of anyone who stood in his way, and firings of anyone who refuses to assist in the revenge.
So, how should news organizations respond to this firehose of falsity? Aggressive, critical, and independent reporting is a must, but unfortunately many news outlets and other media organizations are going in the wrong direction. As July came to a close, Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler took a buyout and ended almost 28 years, more than 14 as lead fact checker, at that news outlet. He estimates that during that time he wrote or edited roughly 3000 fact checks, rating claims of both Democrats and Republicans on a Pinocchio scale. It was Kessler who tallied Trump’s first term at scoring roughly 21 lies per day, a figure that only escalated as Trump obtained a second term.
Kessler wrote, “Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump —and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content —tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information —such as Trump and his allies —led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation.”
At the start of this year, Mark Zuckerberg ended independent fact checking on his Facebook and Instagram platforms, retreating to wimpy “community notes” replies modeled after Elon Musk’s X / Twitter. Google has ended its ClaimsReview program that elevated fact checks in search results.
Of course, 2024 closed with both the Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post spiking endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. Bezos has gone on to dictate that his editorial page henceforth will be devoted to advocating free markets and personal liberties. Recent staff departures and the hiring of three conservative columnists seem to be steps to advance that decision.
ABC News capitulated on a Trump nuisance lawsuit about whether the civil judgment finding him liable for sexual assault can be simplified to rape. CBS News did something similar on a dubious lawsuit on video editing, and later gets stuck with a right-wing columnist as its news editor in chief. Both parent companies, Disney and Paramount/Skydance, appear from the outside to be greasing the skids for business deals by trying to mollify the whiner-in-chief.
We are slipping into a pattern of billionaire owners quelling good reporting that questions when government officials call a dog tail a leg. The opposite direction is what is needed. Add fact checkers and highlight their work. Look askance on any news story that includes the phrase “Trump said…” His veracity is suspect on a scale not even close to that achieved by other politicians. Quote Trump less and look more into his actions and those affected by them. Do not cover his speeches live. Too much malevolence and lying will pour forth ever to be corrected adequately. Comedy programs should consider replaying his speeches with sound effects, like buzzers for lies and slide whistles for personal attacks.
Those of us in journalism education must stress the absolute primacy of accuracy. Secondary virtues, such as fairness and balance (part of early Fox News slogans) cannot be used as a cudgel against accuracy. We do not need to quote or put in a broadcast a flat-earther every time we cover a story involving a spherical Earth. Not all ideas are created equal. Some are well established by empirical science; others are logical fallacies or dubious speculation that skip peer review and confuse correlation with causation.
These are perilous times for both journalism and democratic self-governance. Journalism must not shrink before the challenge by promoting puffery or slipping into the dodge of “both sides,” when one side is using that trope against both accuracy and informed self-governance.
Mark Harmon is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
