Politifact, the factchecker of American politicians, has a long list of half-truths and outright lies for every major politician.
What surprises me, is that being caught telling a factual untruth, is not a political death sentence for the politician telling the lie. it is as if politicians are not just entitled to their own partisan opinions, but also to their partisan facts.
In the Netherlands, telling an outright lie would be a political death sentence. Even quoting a fact that turns out to be unintended factually incorrect, will make the politician open to scorn, and will make him lose a great deal of face.
For instance, a while ago an Republican politician parroted the rumors in such respected media as the Daily Mail :dubious: that “mobile death squads” in the Netherlands were responsible for 30 percent of deaths. The real number is 3 percent. Three percent, not thirty. Facts.
Now, where’s the outrage at that politician? Why doesn’t it seem to hinder him? Why is Trump called on sexist remarks, but not on the many outrageous factual errors he makes?
For instance, Donald Trump is an outright liar. Out of all his controversial statements that have been fact-checked, he has been proven right zero percent, mostly true/half true 25 %, and mostly wrong to pants-on-fire false 75 %.
How is that possible?
In the Netherlands, our own home-grown little Trump, politician Geert Wilders, gets mercilessly grilled by the press whenever he has a fact wrong. To prevent that, he uses colorful rhetoric, like talking about a “tsunami of refugees” “making our Dutch streets unsafe”. No-one can get him on that, and he gains a lot of press attention debating if he is right or not. But even Wilders rarely quotes bullshit facts.
I remember watching a debate years ago, and one politician said to the other, “That’s a lie”. Pundits at the time reacted with shock. You will almost never hear a politician or a pundit use the word “lie” or “liar”. It will be “factually incorrect” or “not the case” or some other euphemism.
I don’t know why this is so, but it seems like using the word “lie” is just beyond the pale in American politics.
Smitty, it’s the same in the Netherlands. Political debaters, and interviewers don’t call anyone an outright liar if they still want a working relationship.
But media will dissect remarks by officials for accuracy. A politician thus caught in an error loses face massively, and will usually try to blame the people working for him (“I’ve been misinformed”) but that won’t help. Two, at most three of such “errors” and the career is over.
It helps, maybe, that our media are not that partisan. Our five major daily newspapers, for instance, all have a different reader profile, but the differences are more social, local and and demographical then political. All media loves to sniff out an error, and they won’t be (much) softer on a politician of a kindred side then on the opposition.
So, who is going to call out a politician on a lie?
The opposition? Like that is going to do a fat lot of good - they’re the opposition!
The media? Well, we know the media can’t be trusted! Besides, the individual reporters want to maintain access to the politician in the future - so, nope, not gonna call out a lie.
I seem to remember some Republicans using the word “lie” on the debate stage. Unfortunately I’m not going to hunt down any examples, so you can feel free to either believe or not believe my memory.
At any rate, the hard part about calling someone out on a lie is that the viewer/reader/listener can’t instantly verify whether or not the thing said is, indeed, a lie. At the very least, the viewer will need to do the legwork of Googling the supposed lie and sifting through the results to determine what he believes to be a legitimate source.
On the other hand, if you call someone out on PC-phrasing, everyone watching can instantly decide whether the phrasing was offensive, over-the-top, disagreeable, etc.
Politifact has been doing some live fact checking during debates. It would be great if they hooked up with the networks running the debate and did a pop up video style live check.
It’s not just the viewers who can’t make those judgments on the fly, I’m not sure the interviewers are sufficiently well informed on the facts to catch untruths.[sup]*[/sup] By the time some intern has done the research on whether something is true or not, the politician’s statement is, quite literally, yesterday’s news. The politician is now in a different city, talking to a different group, and that needs to be reported on. Challenging them at a future date wouldn’t work either; with rare exceptions, U.S. politicians never answer the question they’re actually asked.
I still remember a presidential debate with George H. W. Bush, I think it was in '88. He was asked what weapons programs he would cut in order to decrease the Pentagon’s budget. He cited one that had been something of a high-profile fiasco, and had already been cancelled, but he used its military acronym rather than the popular name everybody knew it by. Brilliant move on his part; he sounds well informed, and there’s no chance of alienating voters whose jobs would be affected. Nobody called him on it.
Getting things wrong does not make one a bad person. Saying hateful things does. Actual lying, like saying that you won’t lose your health insurance, or intentionally underestimating the cost of a proposal of yours(like a war that you claim will pay for itself), should be a political death sentence, but you’re right, it’s not. Obama took more heat for saying “Special Olympics” inappropriately than for just about anything else he’s said. Our society is going crazy.
IMHO it is still the right that is going crazy. Obama did get it wrong, and I still do not think it was a lie because the insurance companies were the ones that did not report properly what they were planning to do.
I think that a political promise that can’t be made good upon, is a different category of lie. Politicians should be careful in what they promise, sure. Anyone remember Bush’s “Read my lips”-promise ? But voters often overestimate the actual influence an individual politician has on a multifacetted, multi-actor problem.
But the other type of lie, misrepresenting actual facts to make a point…a fact that a five minute google search by any speech editor would have proved right or wrong…Either the politican doesn’t have fact checkers ( hard to believe) or the politician willfully ignores their corrections. IMHO, there should be no excuse for that. I’d say that each side touting their own “facts” is a major cause of the increasing plitical divide.
It’s also bad business. I get that a newspaper might be hesitant to point out a lie by Trump because Trump then won’t grant them interviews anymore. But why is that bad? Speeches become available online minutes or hours after they’re held, one Trump photo is very much like another…it seems to me that a newspaper would sell more copies exposing various politicians lies, then by having access to the politican in exchange for docile articles.
I’d say quite the opposite. It’s one thing to try to forecast the future; and with the benefit of hindsight we can look back on whether the prediction was realistic. But it’s another thing to misstate, or misrepresent, the present. Certain things are observable, and measurable. You may hate abortions, and you may hope that they’ll be outlawed, but the numbers from Planned Parenthood are what they are, and a graph with two arrows on it doesn’t change them. Maybe getting things wrong doesn’t make one a bad person, but it should make one a bad politician. If you can’t understand the present, you have no business trying to legislate the future.
Sometimes people fervently believe things that are untrue, and not only will they not punish a politician who restates their belief, they will actively support the politician and praise him or her for finally telling it like it is.
The same goes for TV. When Trump was interviewed in a more confronting way by Megan Kelly, it made for better TV. Better TV in the sense that it got more viewers ( more advertising dollars) and more fame for the interviewers.
Trump may have sputtered afterwards that he would boycott FOX, but recent events have taught us Trump and Fox need each other about equally.
If that is true, it is a skill originating and honed in Christian religion. Christian religion has always been more concerned with the “tribal rightness” of statements, then their “factual rightness”.
There’s also the point that a lie is a deliberate, conscious, knowing untruth. You have to prove not only that something is untrue but that the person actually knows it to be.
That common sense says they ought to know it still allows the possiblity that they’re just an honest, or at worst self-deceivingly optimistic, idiot: which ought also to be a political death sentence, but if enough people are swept up by the rhetoric and want to believe obvious nonsense, saying “It’s not that simple” turns out to be the political death sentence.