# Alternative facts **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 23, 2017, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937 "2017-01-23T16:15:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/161 "2017-01-29T00:12:26Z")
Somehow I get the impression that had Trump and his hordes, er crew read 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, or Fahrenheit 451, they would take those as blueprints and then wonder what went wrong when their heroes (the antagonists) got their comeuppance at the end of the story. ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/162 "2017-01-29T00:26:35Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > Somehow I get the impression that had Trump and his hordes, er crew read 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, or Fahrenheit 451, they would take those as blueprints and then wonder what went wrong when their heroes (the antagonists) got their comeuppance at the end of the story. Ummm…Trump doesn’t read, so he probably never heard of those books. He might have gotten them to watch the movies, I suppose. ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/163 "2017-01-29T01:03:55Z")
Trump is a liar’s liar. > [@](#): > > As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose biggest-best boasts about everything he touched routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me.” > > Yet even jaded connoisseurs of Oval Office dissembling were astonished over the last week by the torrent of bogus claims that gushed from President Trump during his first days in office. > > “We’ve never seen anything this bizarre in our lifetimes, where up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” a book about presidential deception. > > … > > All week long, news organizations chased down one Trump tall tale after another. PolitiFact, a website devoted to checking the veracity of claims by public officials, published 12 “of the most misleading claims” Mr. Trump made during his first White House interview. The Chicago Tribune found that Mr. Trump was incorrect when he claimed two people were shot and killed in Chicago the very hour President Barack Obama was there delivering his farewell address. (There were no shootings, police records showed.) The Philadelphia Inquirer found that Mr. Trump was incorrect when he said the city’s murder rate was “terribly increasing.” (The murder rate has steadily declined over the last decade.) The indefatigable fact checkers at The Washington Post cataloged 24 false or misleading statements made by the president during his first seven days in office… [Cite](https://nyti.ms/2jIgs6O) We’ve finally pinpointed the thing The Donald is **best** at. ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/164 "2017-01-29T03:19:06Z")
[The Perils of Calling Trump a Liar](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/the-perils-of-calling-trump-a-liar-214704) > [@](#): > > The barrage of false, duplicitous, dishonest and misleading statements emanating from Donald Trump and the White House in the last week has again raised the question of whether and when it’s OK for a mainstream news organization—one that aspires to objectivity and non-partisanship in its news coverage—to say flatly that the president is lying… > > But what was mildly controversial during the campaign has become considerably more fraught now that Trump is president. …journalists have begun to wonder—quite legitimately—whether the next four years are going feed them not just a steady diet of the usual White House spin but an exceptionally toxic brew of misinformation, propaganda, bullshit and lies. And it’s not entirely clear how to respond. > > Some want the objective press to repeatedly call out Trump for lying—using the word whenever possible. As they see it, such imprecations could inform the public about the president’s incessant mendacity or at least provide a morally clear and refreshingly blunt description of his modus operandi. Many news editors, however, fear that using the l-word will mean overreaching and speculating about Trump’s intent. Besides, it will be sure to give rise to charges of bias, name-calling and unprofessionalism. On this one, these editors are right. Though it may seem fainthearted to use word like “falsehood” and “untruth,” in the long run the press will have more influence if it avoids insinuating more than it can confidently assert to be true. > > Underneath debates like this are always questions about the place of objectivity in American journalism. For roughly a century, the most important and prestigious news outlets have aspired to present the news without partisan coloration. … I don’t see how pointing out a lie can be called partisanship. I think IGNORING a lie can definitely be called partisanship, as when Breitbart and FOX parrot Trump’s lies. But when The Donald states as fact something that is clearly not true… isn’t the press shirking when it equivocates? “Spin” is one thing but an out-and-out LIE ought to be called just that, shouldn’t it? Not that in the article the writer makes the point that calling something a lie is a judgment that not only is the stated fact not true, but that there was an _intent to deceive_ on the part of the liar. Maybe they don’t have to use the “L-word.” Maybe they can just say “this statement is **wrong**.” Wrong is a statement about the alleged fact itself and leaves out any mind-reading of whoever said the wrong thing. ---
**Author:** ![E-DUB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/e-dub/32/403_2.png) [@E-DUB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-DUB)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/165 "2017-01-29T04:20:38Z")
ThelmaLou wrote: “Maybe they don’t have to use the “L-word.” Maybe they can just say “this statement is wrong.” Wrong is a statement about the alleged fact itself and leaves out any mind-reading of whoever said the wrong thing.” Yeah, they could just be stupid…real stupid. Dumber than dirt so dumb that the other dirt makes fun of it. ---
**Author:** ![drad\_dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@drad\_dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drad_dog)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/166 "2017-01-29T04:40:32Z")
How about “The statement has been disproven and is factually incorrect. The Presidents intentions are unclear” ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2017, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/167 "2017-01-29T04:42:37Z")
> [@drad\_dog](#): > > How about “The statement has been disproven and is factually incorrect. The Presidents intentions are unclear” Perfect! ---
**Author:** ![BigAppleBucky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigapplebucky/32/178_2.png) [@BigAppleBucky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigAppleBucky)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2017, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/168 "2017-02-09T18:19:23Z")
[Poetry](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/opinion/to-reject-trump-the-perverse-poets-wage-a-battle-in-verse.html?ref=opinion&_r=0) \*Well now, Kellyanne Conway has lately conceived Of a new understanding of what to believe When the truth gives you heartburn, don’t worry, relax You can always resort to alternative facts! Oh it works for the Donald and all of his hacks As they go ’bout promoting their retrograde acts Don’t fret if your documentation is lax You can always get by with alternative facts! Don’t fear all those women with signs on their backs The straight and the queer, the whites and blacks You can trivialize them with snide little cracks And wash them away with alternative facts! Just as loggers might swing an alternative ax And fell a great tree with alternative whacks When the truth won’t cooperate, try some new tacks We live in an age of alternative facts!\* ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2017, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alternative-facts/777937/169 "2017-02-09T18:23:59Z")
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