Below is the WSJ response to my “Letter To the Editor” -
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Dear Ms. Muffler,
Thank for your email about Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker's recent appearance on “Meet the Press.”
Here is an opinion piece by Mr. Baker published in The Wall Street Journal in which he expanded on his thoughts about this important topic.
Sincerely,
Judi Walsh
NEWS EDITOR, NEWSROOM STANDARDS
Trump, 'Lies' and Honest Journalism
By Gerard Baker
1082 words
5 January 2017
The Wall Street Journal
A15
Copyright 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
'When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself: 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?'" As a statement of fierce journalistic independence, this advice from Louis Heren, a veteran correspondent of the Times of London, reflects an admirable if slightly jaundiced view of the reporter's job. As an operating principle of objective, civil and fair-minded journalism it leaves a little to be desired.
But after a remarkable presidential election campaign, and as we stand on the cusp of the Donald Trump presidency, it captures the posture of many journalists toward the president-elect. Mr. Trump certainly has a penchant for saying things whose truthfulness is, shall we say for now, challengeable. Much of the traditional media have spent the past year grappling with how to treat Mr. Trump's utterances. It's an important question and one that has received a fresh burst of energy in recent days, partly, well, because of me.
In a New Year's Day broadcast on NBC's "Meet The Press," moderator Chuck Todd asked whether I, as the editor in chief of the Journal, would be comfortable characterizing in our journalism something Mr. Trump says as a "lie."
Here's what I said: "I'd be careful about using the word 'lie.' 'Lie' implies much more than just saying something that's false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead."
Immediately, my remarks were followed by another fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite. Dan Rather, a former television newsman of some renown, weighed in to call the remarks "deeply disturbing." I will confess to feeling a little burst of pride at being instructed in reporting ethics by Mr. Rather. It feels a little like being lectured on the virtues of abstinence by Keith Richards.
But these are serious allegations. I -- and The Wall Street Journal -- stand accused of imperiling the republic by adopting a craven deference to presidential mendacity. So let me elucidate. A couple of points ought to be obvious but might be worth pointing out at the start.
Note that I said I'd be "careful" in using the word "lie." I didn't ban the word from the Journal's lexicon. Evidently, this carefulness is widely shared in the newsrooms of America. While some of the fresher news organizations have routinely called out Mr. Trump as a liar in their reporting, as far as I can tell, traditional newsrooms -- print, digital, television -- have used the term sparingly. Given the number of times Mr. Trump seems to have uttered falsehoods, that looks like prima facie evidence of a widespread reluctance to label him a liar.
Why the reluctance? For my part, it's not because I don't believe that Mr. Trump has said things that are untrue. Nor is it because I believe that when he says things that are untrue we should refrain from pointing it out. This is exactly what the Journal has done.
Mr. Trump has a record of saying things that are, as far as the available evidence tells us, untruthful: thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 on the rooftops of New Jersey, millions of votes cast illegally in the presidential election, President Obama's supposed foreign birth. We can also point out that the circumstances are such that it's reasonable to infer that Mr. Trump should know that these statements are untrue.
The issue is not whether we reporters should test what he, or anyone, says against the known and established facts and offer a fair assessment of its veracity. We do that all the time. We have a duty to our readers to ascertain whether the people we report on are telling the truth. The question is how we present our reporting.
I believe the right approach is to present our readers with the facts. This does not mean presenting a false equivalence between one person's inaccurate statement and the observable truth, as though they were of equal epistemic value, but a weighing of a claim against the known facts. When Mr. Trump claimed that millions of votes were cast illegally, we noted, high up in our report, that there was no evidence for such a claim. No fair-minded or intelligent reader was left in any doubt whether this was a truthful statement.
But I'm not sure the story would have been improved by our telling the reader in categorical terms that Mr. Trump had told a "lie." In fact I'm confident that the story -- and our reputation for trustworthy and factual news reporting -- would have been damaged. The word "lie" conveys a moral as well as factual judgment. To accuse someone of lying is to impute a willful, deliberate attempt to deceive. It says he knowingly used a misrepresentation of the facts to mislead for his own purposes.
Now, I may believe that many of the things Mr. Trump has said in the past year are whoppers of the first order. But there's a difference between believing that, with reason -- my induction from knowledge of the facts -- and reporting it as a fact. The latter demands a very high standard of reporting. If we are to use the term "lie" in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject's state of knowledge and his moral intent. I can see circumstances where we might. I'm reluctant to use the term, not implacably against it.
To refrain from labeling leaders' statements as lies is to support an unrelenting but not omniscient press, one that trusts readers' judgments rather than presenting judgments to them. If we routinely make these kinds of judgments, readers would start to see our inevitably selective use of a moral censure as partisanship. We must not only be objective. We must be seen to be objective to continue to earn our readers' trust.
What matters is that we report the story and that we find the truth. It's our job also to point out when candidates, presidents, chief executives, public officials or others in the news say things that are untrue. But I'm content for the most part to leave the judgment about motive -- and mendacity -- to our readers, who are more than capable of making up their own minds about what constitutes a lie.
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Mr. Baker is The Wall Street Journal's editor in chief.
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