Good morning and happy Wednesday. Today I thought I’d share this article by Jamison Foser, formerly of Media Matters, that talks about the failure of the media to properly grapple with the lies told by Trump and Vance.

Sixteen years ago this month, when I was executive vice president of Media Matters for America, I introduced a phrase, “privileging the lie,” to describe the news media’s tendency to center lies in its coverage of politics – not to center the fact that the people telling the lies are liars, but rather to center the lie; to adopt it as the framing for their reporting.

When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.

That’s what the news media has done over the last week. The news media surely affects what people think, but it has a larger and more powerful effect on what people think about. So even as the media has done a better-than-usual job of debunking the Trump-Vance lies, it has privileged those lies by helping Trump and Vance increase the salience of immigration, an issue the Trump-Vance campaign believes helps it.

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So how should the news media approach this? How can they cover the Trump-Vance lies without privileging the lie? Simple: Make the character and actions of the people telling the lie the story, rather than making the topic of the lie the story.

When Donald Trump lies that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets, that should be the hook for an article about Donald Trump’s long history of lying; about the fundamental lack of honest, character, and integrity that this demonstrates. The result of Trump’s lies shouldn’t be articles about immigration, it should be articles about Donald Trump’s lifelong dishonesty and the consequences it poses, and articles about Trump’s lengthy history of directing hatred at racial minorities, and about his lengthy history of intentionally inciting threats of violence as well as actual violence.

I know some people will object to this. “This is just how journalism is done,” they will say. “News companies assess the truthfulness of statements and give readers context about the underlying debate, they don’t suggest people are liars.” To which I would respond, first of all, that “this is how things are done” is pretty much never a compelling response to “this is how things should be done.” And second of all: Yes, this is exactly what news companies do — when they want to. The New York Times and other news companies made honesty (or the supposed lack thereof) a dominant theme of their coverage of Hillary Clinton (“Americans Don’t Trust Her” … “besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty,” to pick just two random examples) and Al Gore. In the ten New York Times news articles about Trump’s lies about immigrations, you won’t find so much as a single aside suggesting he is “besieged by lingering doubts about his honesty.” If you’re thinking that’s because unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump isn’t “besieged by lingering doubts about his honesty,” think again! A Marist poll released this month found that among the 27 percent of registered voters who say the most important quality in president is honesty and trustworthiness, Kamala Harris leads Trump 72% to 26%. Donald Trump’s dishonesty should be a central theme of the story on the merits, and there’s plenty of evidence it hurts him with voters, if the news media needs additional justification for focusing on it (which they shouldn’t.)

Not that this doesn’t echo many of the conversations we’ve had about the NYT and other news organizations here, but I thought this was a good read and that y’all might enjoy.

Be kind and thoughtful today. Cheers.