Journalist Dan Froomkin has been reporting and commenting on American issues for more than two decades. He founded Press Watch in 2019. Today’s Fact-checking needs to make way for reality-testing and gaslighting-fighting is worth close attention.

Political journalism needs to find a better solution to the aggressive, partisan spreading of misinformation and disinformation…

Froomkin says the party of America’s right-wing — this applies in Canada too —  abandoned forthright arguments in favor of dog-whistles and disinformation.

It’s the context, the frequency and the motive that establish how serious a problem that is. Fact-checkers engage in laughably gutless euphemisms and gimmickry (“Pinocchios,” and “Pants on Fire”) while traditionally avoiding the term “lie”.

…In the Trump era (although it’s not just Trump) the pace of the lying has become overwhelming, and the consequences of lying have become effectively nil.

…The asymmetry in lying is now arguably the biggest political story there is, not the stuff of occasional assessments and sidebars. It poses a serious danger to the proper functioning of our democracy and is an affront to core journalistic values.

We cannot expect Postmedia newspapers to report on right wing lies, but Globe & Mail ought to be better when reporting on politics. They may be better but that is not always the case.

In a late 2023 article, political reporter Campbell Clark wrote about Pierre Poilievre telling lies when the Conservative leader claimed that the Canada-Ukraine free-trade agreement would force Ukraine to adopt a carbon tax. That was untrue.

Poilievre repeated that claim and then “ratcheted the falsehood to new heights by arguing that beleaguered Ukrainians are going to have to pay a devastating carbon tax because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has saddled them with it in a trade deal.”

As published, Clark’s article uses these adjectives and a verb to describe Poilievre’s comments:

• falsehood,
• false claim,
• untrue,
• fabricating,
• tall tale,
• misleading

Nowhere does it say bluntly that the Conservative leader was lying. The Globe’s headline writer avoided the harsh description and wrote, “Pierre Poilievre tells tales.” Not even tall tales.

In common usage, a tale is a story that may or may not be true. The publication that wants to be known as Canada’s “newspaper of record” ought not to avoid describing a potential Prime Minister as a liar when he lies.