It’s a fact: politicians lie, and the news media exposes their lies. It may seem surprising, but lately dictionaries, not the media, have become the guardians of facts and the exposers of lies.
In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) interrupted Pres. Barack Obama’s speech to Congress on health care, shouting “You lie!” Obama stopped mid-speech, and said, “That’s not true.” But the next day, CNN fact checkers sorted this out. Wilson lied and Obama told the truth: the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, would not cover undocumented aliens. Wilson’s blunt outburst was condemned by Republicans as well as Democrats, and he apologized for his startling breach of decorum. But he did not apologize for lying. He clearly still believed his own lie, as did the other enemies of Obamacare.
More recently, Donald Trump and his supporters have been responsible for promulgating even more egregious lies, denying the truth of everything from climate change to the vote count in the presidential election to the size of the audience on inauguration day. When the media challenges these lies, the new administration accuses the “lying media” of putting out “fake news.”
Rather than countering these attacks on its credibility, the media has been reluctant to label the Trump administration’s statements lies. At worst, outlets like Fox News publish the lies as facts. At best, as Callum Borchers wrote in the Washington Post, the media calls them falsehoods, or tags them with adjectives like false, bogus, debunked, unsupported, unsubstantiated, unconfirmed, or phrases like wrongly claimed, which suggests a mistake, not an intentional lie. Here are some examples of how the press softens the blow:
The Washington Post called press secretary Sean Spicer’s lies falsehoods. Falsehood is s a synonym for lie, without the sting. Calling lies falsehoods is pulling your punch. The Post rates politicians’ falsehoods on a Pinocchio scale. Cute, but turns exposing lies into a party game, mitigating the damage that the lies cause. Political lies need a Richter scale, not a scale based on the nose of a fictional puppet best known as the protagonist of a Disney cartoon.
The New York Times called Donald Trump’s lies about the size of the inauguration crowd and his attack on the CIA false claims. False claims is even weaker than falsehoods. It called other Trump statements fraudulent, which is weaker than fraud, which is weaker than lie.
The Guardian called Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud unsupported beliefs. To be fair, the Guardian published a strong anti-Trump editorial as well. But calling his lies unsupported beliefs is weak, weak, weak. Losers.
In a rare burst of clarity, the New York Times finally called Trump’s lies about undocumented immigrants voting against him lies. Oh, New York Times, what took you so long? But the Times headline was a rarity, and the subhead scaled lies back to false claims. Sad.
Newspapers have been reluctant to call a lie a lie. That leaves dictionaries as the guardians of truth. When Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway rebranded Sean Spicer’s lies about how many people watched the inauguration as alternative facts, Merriam-Webster called her out with a tweet defining fact: “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” That was followed by a link to Conway's lie.
Every media copyeditor—they all have dictionaries on their desks—should remind reporters of this definition. The reporters should need no reminders, since they all have dictionary apps on their phones and laptops.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of fact is pithy, but hardly unusual. Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines fact:
That which is known (or firmly believed) to be real or true; what has actually happened or is the case; truth attested by direct observation or authentic testimony; reality.
The American Heritage Dictionary has this: “Knowledge or information based on real occurrences.” Collins gives as synonyms “truth, reality, certainty.” And Macmillan has “a piece of true information.”
That means alternative facts are fake facts. That’s why Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth its word of the year for 2016. Oxford did this in response to the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom--which prompted all sorts of lies about the consequences of leaving the European Union, followed by Prime Minister Theresa May's attempt to clarify the meaning of leaving: "Brexit means Brexit." And to the American presidential election, roiled with fake news about emails and vote fraud. Although the phrase post-truth has been around for a decade, Oxford felt that it best captured “the ethos, mood, or preoccupations” of 2016.
Dictionaries should not be the only ones keeping truth alive. They should not be the only ones holding politicians accountable for their words. The dictionary's job is to remind us—in definitions and in tweets (because more people are reading social media than dictionaries)—that words mean what we, the speakers of our language, agree that they mean. Now dictionaries also have to remind us that, if we allow words to be kidnapped by liars, then those lies will become the new truth. Post-truth won’t be just the word of the year, it will be the new normal.
Dictionaries are not supposed to be the public conscience. That’s the job of the media. When dictionaries say that we live in a post-truth age, or they remind what facts are supposed to be, that’s not a politer way of saying, “you lie.” Instead, it’s a way of telling us that, unless we’re careful, lying will no longer matter. They’re not saying words can’t change their meaning, they’re warning us not to let words become meaningless. They're saying, "alternative facts" is not a synonym for "facts." It's not an antonym, either. It's a lie. They’re saying that calling out lies matters more than ever. They’re reminding us that post-truth cannot become the new normal without our complicity. They’re warning us not to let that happen.
We'll know they're telling the truth when Trump tweets a three-a.m. rant about lying lexicographers. If you don’t know what complicity means, you’d better look it up.
Above: The New York Times combats Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts. Below: Merriam-Webster tweets to remind us, and Kellyanne Conway, of the normal definition of fact.
