Newspapers to Trump: Liar, liar, pants on fire

By the editors of Media Life

This article is part of a Media Life series “Reinventing the American Newspaper.” Click here to read other stories in the series.

The headline pretty much said it all: “A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump.”

The New York Times story went on to detail “a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies” delivered by the Republican presidential candidate, including 31 of what the paper dubbed his most egregious lies, ranging from his stance on the Iraq war to who started the birther movement.

The headline might as well have read “Trump’s a big fat liar.”

A few years ago, a story like this about a presidential candidate in any newspaper, let alone the staid NY Times, would have been unthinkable.

This campaign season, it’s become all but de rigueur. Articles taking down Trump aren’t appearing just on the editorial pages. Often they’re on the front pages.

The Washington Post, Politico and The Los Angeles Times have run similar stories detailing what they term Trump’s lies. The New York Daily News openly campaigns against Trump.

This is an entirely new trend in American journalism. For decades, newspapers and for that matter broadcast news outlets prided themselves on their objectivity and independence in reporting the news. Report the news, fill in all the facts, let the readers and viewers interpret the news as they saw fit. That was the mantra.

New news paradigm, or it is the candidate?

It would appear Trump, and Trump alone, has changed all that.

But maybe not.

What’s different this this election, some argue, is not the media but the candidates-or rather one candidate, Trump, and Trump has brought it on himself with his stream of lies and half-truths.

They argue that the Times and other papers are just doing their job in calling Trump out, just as they are doing their job when exposing an environment hazard or political corruption. It’s just good reporting, factual reporting.

“Of course he is a liar-systematically, unceasingly, unapologetically. If it is not media’s job to expose untruths, it has no other reason for being than profiteering,” Todd Gitlin, professor and chair of the Ph.D. program at Columbia Journalism School, tells Media Life.

For newspaper publishers, calling out Trump comes with some risk, that of alienating their many Republican readers at a time when they need to hold onto every reader they can. Some 26 percent of daily newspaper readers identify as Republicans, and many of them are Trump supporters.

Yet some media buyers think it’s a risk papers should be taking anyway.

“They treated him way too easily,” one buyer tells Media Life. “They did not protect the citizenry by providing questions and fact checking soon enough.”

Columbia’s Gitlin agrees.

“Only after he had the nomination locked up did they rise to their proper task of disputing falsehoods and pressing him to face unwelcome questions,” he says.

“That process is incomplete but journalism is finally, unevenly, doing its job.”

Imagining Trump in the White House

Perhaps the most intriguing question is whether, now emboldened, the media going forward will be as quick in calling out the mistruths of future candidates.

More immediately, how might they behave if Trump should win the White House?

Will they be calling him out in their daily coverage?

The answer is probably not.

“Even though I’m not in the prophecy business, I think that the media are uncomfortable with an oppositional role, in no small part for commercial reasons, and I fear that some segment of TV news-not so much newspapers-will defer to him far more than truth warrants,” Gitlin says.

Tags: debate, donald trump, liar, media trump, reinventing the american newspaper, trump, trump media