News media hesitate to use 'lie' for Trump's misstatements

[mahatmakanejeeves]

News media hesitate to use ‘lie’ for Trump’s misstatements

By DAVID BAUDER
41 minutes ago

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump has been accused of dishonesty, spreading falsehoods, misrepresenting facts, distorting news, passing on inaccuracies and being loose with the truth. But does he lie?

It’s a loaded word, and some Trump critics believe major news organizations are too timid to use it. The Washington Post, which has documented more than 4,000 false or misleading claims by the president, declared for the first time last week that a Trump misstatement was a “lie.”

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s plea deal provided “indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest” about hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote. The Post put Kessler’s assessment on its front page, and it was the newspaper’s most-read story online.

Not only was it the first time the Post fact checker said Trump had lied, it was the first time he used the word for any politician since Kessler began his fact-checking operation in 2011.
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The story has been amended to correct the number of instances Kessler’s team found Trump had lied about his tax cut, and to clarify that after Michael’s Cohen plea was the first time the Post’s fact checker said Trump had lied.

[C_U_L8R]

1. Trump depends on their timidity

just look at all the crap he's gotten away with.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

2. MSNBC uses the word....LIE......

Which is the correct word to use when Trump flat out lies.

[dewsgirl]

3. If I hear the word falsehood one more time, I may just lose it.

[Gothmog]

4. Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie.

Washington Post just called trump a liar last week https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/23/not-just-misleading-not-merely-false-lie/?utm_term=.8226900989a0

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

The second came in January of this year, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that Trump denied all the allegations and any payments. Even Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, got in on the action, saying the president “was not aware of any of it.”

In April, Trump finally weighed in, answering a question about whether he knew about a payment to porn star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, with a flat “no.”

It’s now clear that the president’s statement was a lie — and that the people speaking for him repeated it.