Objective reporting in an age of lies

In the aftermath of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, many questions are being posed. How will such a conservative judge affect the balance and integrity of the highest court in the land? How should the media cover events like this? Should the mistakes someone makes as a teenager follow them throughout their life? The writers of The Samohi tried to pose answers to those sizable questions."Corroborating evidence" is a legal term that refers to evidence that strengthens, adds to, authenticates or confirms already existing evidence. It encompasses any information that lends credence to a claim posited by other evidence—usually a testimony. There was a mountain of corroborating evidence—by its legal definition—in support of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. But for two straight months, Republican politicians lied to the American people about its definition, and confirmed a nominee to the Supreme Court based on that lie. In the past two decades, the term "post-truth politics" has become increasingly widespread as new media forms allow for the rapid dissemination of misinformation. First coined in the early 1990s in reference to a slew of political lies in the preceding decades, (the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra Affair and the Persian Gulf War, to name a few) post-truth politics refers to the repeating of false statements by politicians long after they have been proven false. Politicians guilty of this behavior lie with the hope of persuading those who will believe blindly, betting on the public's ignorance and inability to fact-check on their own. Whether these tactics prove successful depends almost wholly on the response ofby the nation's journalistic outlets. And in the age of Trump, news sources have fallen woefully short of the mark.President Trump lies incessantly, and has even before the inception of his presidential campaign. This is no partisan attack; independent fact checkers routinely disprove claims from virtually every  televised appearance he makes. One such fact checker, Politifact, rated a whopping 55 percent of Trump's claims "false" or "mostly false" and another 14 percent "pants on fire," Politifact's most egregious category of lie. (For context, Politifact rates former president Obama's "false" and "mostly false" claims at 24 percent and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's at 35 percent.) Both through his Twitter account and through numerous public appearances, Trump supplies the news media with a near-constant stream of false statements. This presents a unique challenge for journalists. The actual word "lie" implies intent, and while repeated false statements by the President of the United States certainly seems willful, there is the possibility that he's just incorrect or misinformed every time. This sounds far-fetched, but it's within the realm of possibility and therefore an issue for objectivity. But many news outlets don't just avoid implying intent; they present statements completely objectively, with no indication of truthfulness or lack thereof.This manifests most obviously in headlines. A Politico article this month entitled "Trump wants new middle-class tax cut 'of about 10 percent'" ... that's almost certainly a lie. The midterms are just a week away, and such a large tax cut on the middle class goes wholly against Republican strategy thus far. In fact, asserting that Trump actually "wants" these cuts just because he said it is in itself an assumption of intent. But Politico took the words of a president who lies more than half of the time and presented them as fact. They're not alone in that; mainstream sources regularly trot out articles like this that only serve to parrot the claims of politicians, regardless of their validity. This behavior has far-reaching consequences. One “Washington Post” article from late September was entitled "Some GOP senators concede Ford’s credibility, but point to lack of corroboration," completely ignoring the fallacy of the senator’s claim. That claim was the centerpiece of the Republican case for Kavanaugh; key swing-vote senators like Susan Collins and Jeff Flake both invoked it in their announcements of their decisions to vote “yes.” These senators are law professionals; they knew the definition of the term that they were deliberately misusing. But the press promulgated their false narrative and allowed the Supreme Court to be altered by a lie for decades to come.None of this is to say that reporters don't fact-check the claims that they report on, because they do; usually a disclaimer will appear in the article itself, and the “Washington Post” does sporadically publish articles with titles like "President Trump has made 3,001 misleading false or misleading claims so far." Some misleading headlines, like NBC News' "Critics charge Georgia GOP gov candidate purging voters before election" (the candidate did, in fact, purge the voter role and critics criticized him for doing so) are clarified in the main body of the article. But few readers make it that far. A 2014 study in “The Washington Post” found that almost six in ten Americans don't read much past headlines. So if a headline reads "Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of colluding with Russia," (as on NBC News just this month) the casual reader has no reason to think that it is not a legitimate claim.The press has a vitally important job in any democracy, but when elected leaders deliberately deceive and admit to being nationalists that job becomes essential. Too often, American reporters confuse objectivity with apathy and bias with perspective. Calling out the lies of those who claim to serve isn't partisan. It's journalism.