Krull
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s unsealed legal brief on former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election goes a long way toward ending at least one debate.
Ever since Trump rode down the golden escalator to declare his candidacy for the White House, he’s presented an ethical challenge for journalists.
The former president’s predilection for saying things that aren’t true confounded a time-tested journalistic convention. Journalists struggled with whether to say something that wasn’t truthful or to say that he was lying.
That may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it isn’t.
We all may be mistaken from time to time and say something that isn’t true without knowing that it isn’t accurate or grounded in fact. We misspeak. We misstate. We screw up.
Lying, though, is not a mistake. It is a deliberate decision to mislead, a conscious determination to violate the truth.
Most often, knowing whether someone is lying or simply mistaken requires knowledge that is beyond the grasp of a journalist or, for that matter, anyone else. Determining that demands that we know someone’s intent.
The cliché young journalists are taught in their apprenticeship is that we cannot know what goes on inside someone’s head. We only can know what they do or say.
So, that’s what we report.
This often leads to clumsy formulations in stories, moments when journalists report some gross mangling of fact by a public figure and then awkwardly provide the evidence as to why it’s untrue.
The goal never was to make one’s storytelling clunky or prose lifeless.
It was to honor the journalistic convention and avoid trying to read someone’s mind.
Trump, though, challenged this convention in at least two ways.
One problem was the sheer volume of the former president’s assaults on truth. The Washington Post tracked the number of times Trump said something demonstrably false or misleading during the four years of his presidency.
The final tally was 30,573.
That worked out to about 21 distortions of fact or falsehoods per day.
Fact checkers wore themselves out trying to keep up with the former president’s falsifications. Generally, by the time they’d caught and corrected it for public consumption, Trump had uttered another four or five falsities.
That was one problem.
The other was that Trump never seemed troubled when he was caught mangling the truth. Nor would he correct his falsehoods, even when he was confronted with overwhelming evidence that what he’d said or posted just was not true.
All politicians at one time or another shade the truth. They emphasize the parts that flatter them or support their agenda and tend to obscure or even overlook the parts that don’t.
Until Trump came along, though, relatively few persisted in pushing untruths after it had been demonstrated their claims weren’t supported by fact.
Trump just didn’t seem concerned about whether what he said was true. Even in the face of proof he was wrong about something, he would continue to maintain he was right.
This created a dilemma for journalists.
It was clear that Trump did not care whether he told the truth, but did that mean that he was deliberately lying?
Or just that he thought the truth didn’t matter much?
This is where Smith’s brief on Trump’s attempts to overthrow the last presidential election results is so helpful.
I’ve read all 165 pages of the brief. It is heavy with details, citations and attribution.
What normally is called proof.
Trump erupted when the judge in his case unsealed it.
It’s easy to see why. The evidence that Trump conspired to break the law and thwart the will of the people is overwhelming.
That evidence is presented by people who were Trump’s political allies, but who stopped short of committing perjury for him.
The courts will determine whether Smith’s case carries the day, if the former president’s desperate attempt to regain his office and quash all attempts to hold him accountable for his misdeeds does not succeed.
But Smith’s brief makes one thing clear regarding the challenge Trump presented to journalistic convention.
The brief documents the many, many times Trump’s advisors told him his election claims were false. It also documents the times Trump acknowledged he hadn’t won the election but was determined to claim he had, anyway.
He knew what he was doing.
It’s safe to say he was lying.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
