There’s No Penalty for Lying But Journalists Could Mount an Effort to Change That

By Paul Greeley

NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.

Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.

And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.

News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com

There’s No Penalty for Lying, But Journalists Could Mount an Effort to Change That

By Stacey Woelfel

My Substack posts automatically go to my Facebook account, so I often see and reply to comments there.

Last week’s post about social media ended up there and one of the first commenters—a former student and friend who’s politically on the right—stated that he was surprised I didn’t write about the networks that chose not to air Donald Trump’s address last week.

The truth is I never thought much about that as subject matter for a Substack post because, to me, it was a non-issue.

Not only is there plenty of precedent to not air presidential addresses (the networks chose not to air addresses by Biden in 2022 and Obama in 2014, for instance), but I’ve always believed journalists should set the agenda on how they expend valuable resources, column inches and airtime.

Politicians typically set their agendas by what is good for themselves. Journalists should—and usually do—set their agendas by what is good for their audiences. The networks (with the exception of CBS, wink wink) didn’t see the news value in airing the address live, deciding to cover it as a news event instead.

Aside from the question of who sets the agenda, the bigger problem with airing politicians live is that they lie.

Whether we air lies in something as weighty as a presidential address or something as light as a state fair stump speech, we give a tacit stamp of approval to those lies by airing them, in effect giving the politicians a free pass to lie.

And, while politicians have always lied (we all know that old George Washington-cherry tree-“I cannot tell a lie” thing was made up by a biographer two years after his death, right?), Donald Trump has reached Olympic levels with his falsehoods.

The Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading statements from Trump in his first term. Nonpartisan and indepedent Politifact uses a meticulously sourced “Truth-O-Meter” to rate presidential (and other) statements as “True,” “Mostly True,” Half True,” Mostly False,” “False” or “Pants on Fire.”

Its count has 78 percent of Trump claims on the lying side. For comparison, Biden’s lies totaled 42 percent and Obama’s lies were at 25 percent. If you look only at the “Pants on Fire” percentages for each man—the most egregious of lies—Obama’s Pants on Fire percentage was just less that 1 percent, Biden’s was 2 percent and Trump’s is 19 percent.

Even Forbes magazine—not exactly a liberal mouthpiece—shows first-term Trump lied at a higher rate than his predecessors during his first 100 days, with Obama lying at a rate of 8 percent, Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 59 percent.

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Many volumes will be written someday analyzing why Trump lies so much more than the presidential norm, but my interest for now is in just one of those reasons.

Trump lies as much as he does because he and his people know there’s no penalty for his doing so.

The man racked up more than 30 thousand lies during his first term and people went and elected him to a second one. And while Trump may be a champion liar, trust me when I say that politicians in both parties have taken note of the fact that lying comes with no cost and ALL of them will be acting on that knowledge in the future. The Trump presidencies have opened the door for all future presidents (and candidates) to lie as much as they want.

That’s a depressing thought that goes straight to the heart of the workings of democracy.

For any democratic system to work, voters must have information. In theory, a perfectly informed electorate—a set of voters who literally know everything—would enable a perfect democracy. That perfection is not humanly possible, but the founding fathers strived to give voters as much information as possible, enshrining a free press in the First Amendment. And, if we do our jobs correctly, even a lie-filled presidential address can lead to a more informed electorate.

Here’s how we do it. We stop airing presidential addresses live—sort of. We can start them live, but we must then pause along the way and give viewers some facts to either back up what the president is saying or call out the lies.

If you’re thinking I’m suggesting live fact checking, you’re right—but on a scale we’ve never done before. So as not to confuse it with the generally ineffective live fact checking we see now, I’m going to call what I’m suggesting something new, “Political Accuracy Watchdog Service,” or “PAWS” for short.

PAWS done right will take a lot of resources, so the first step to making this happen is to team up.

News organizations need to forget their competitive nature and combine resources so they have enough firepower to throw at this task. No one news operation can afford to do this right.

And if you’re thinking newsrooms are too competitive to team up for a project like this, we’ve actually seen similar ventures work—at least for a while—before.

Newsrooms in some large markets have formed pools to share coverage of mundane events like news conferences. And partnerships have formed to produce political debates and other special events. This PAWS effort will call for unprecedented levels of cooperation on a national scale. I envision the major broadcast and cable networks joining with national newspapers, magazines and web sites to form the team necessary to pull this off.

We need all these resources because, to do this properly, scores of experts will be needed to react in real time as they listen to each presidential address.

The experts will work in small groups, perhaps three or so.

Each group will represent a specific area of expertise on a fairly granular level. So there would be a transportation group, a medical group, an economy group and so on. Some fields should break down even further, so rather than a single defense group, we probably need individual groups focused on the Middle East, Russia, China, cyber warfare and more.

All the work can be done remotely, so no need to gather the groups in any one place. Each expert or team of experts just needs access to the live feed of the president. They will listen and, as their subject matter comes up, quickly go to work to determine how truthful the president’s words are and to have the facts to call out the lies, showing what’s really true.

All the networks and streamers showing the address—and it really needs to be all of them to make this effective—pause the feed after a statement is made, allowing the experts to give their report on its accuracy. Then the speech resumes until the next statement to be verified and the process repeats itself again.

The expert teams whose subject matter comes up at the beginning of the address will have to work very quickly, but as the address gets paused more and more often, those experts with subject matter than comes up later will have more time to give us more information. And, in those cases where a preview version of the address is released early, the experts can get to work as soon as they get their hands on it. This will, of course, turn an hour-long speech into a two- or three-hour event, but the extra time will be packed with vital information. Viewers will be able to watch it live to see all the fact verification in somewhat real time, or they can watch it later when the networks and streamers make it available to watch on demand. Smart news organizations will chop it up to bite-sized pieces to air and publish as news stories.

The net effect of a process like PAWS will be more than just giving the electorate more truthful information.

It will re-incentivize presidents to cut back on the lying.

Not only will they suffer the very immediate effect of hearing their lies called out as they happen, but it will create an archive of those lies available for the public to consult and political opponents to mine for campaign material.

Lie counts will be easy to glean from the feed and, since more lies will mean more pauses and more needs to report the truth, we’ll get a quick metric on who lies the most—the president with the shortest total feed will be judged to have told the truth the most.

I hope it’s clear at this point that this is not just about Trump. I’m talking about all presidents and major candidates going forward. They’ll feel they have a free pass to lie all they want. We’ve got to do our part to stop it.

One key to the success of a massive—and massively important—project like this is to get buy-in across ideological differences in news organizations.

It shouldn’t be hard to get traditional, legacy newsrooms to see the value in pumping out this much truthful information to voters. But getting partisan media, from Fox News, the Washington Times and others on the right to Huff Post and Mother Jones and others on the left will be a tougher sell.

There is some peril in bringing into the fold organizations that don’t follow unbiased journalistic norms. But the act of melding their contributions with the mainstream media should prove to hold more reward than risk—as long as the experts they contribute are actually experts and not political pundits. We’ll need not only the stable of experts each can bring, but we’ll need buy-in from the fragmented audiences each serves. If those fragmented audiences see the same PAWS on the channels with which they are comfortable as everyone else is seeing, we’ll really start to see some impact.

Am I being a bit of a dreamer to think that PAWS on this scale can happen?

Yes, of course. But we must start somewhere.

Perhaps a trial run at the local level could prove its viability.

If you’re reading this as a news director or executive producer in a local market, talk it over with your newsroom and see if you could mount an effort to try it out this election season.

Could you bring in the other TV stations and the local newspaper to give this a try? Local politicians lie, too, so focusing on a hot Congressional race or mayoral campaign would be a great place to give it a shot on a smaller scale. There’s no need for it even to be live. Take a recorded address and work it over. Because of the proximity of the audiences to these local newsrooms, not only would a trial run at that level let us know if the system works, but it will be much easier to find out what the candidates and the audience thinks of it.

This is one of those ideas that everyone will come at with all the reasons it won’t work. But what we’re doing now definitely isn’t working.

Current fact checking only reaches a small portion of the electorate. But there are so many more people who need it.

If we as journalists are going to play our proper role in democracy, we must try something more to be effective. This is one suggestion from me. Tell me how you’d do it.

Paul Greeley is the manager and a writer for News Blues.

He can be reached at Paul@NewsBlues.com or 817-578-6324.