Newsrooms Need to Get Tougher on All That Lying

Practical steps we can take would help

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

In a country that can’t agree on much, there’s widespread agreement that our public life has coarsened over the last 15 years. One of the key reasons, I think, is that there’s far less social sanction for lying, especially in public, than there once was.

The press needs to assume its share of responsibility for this state of affairs—lying, after all, is antithetical to good journalism, the cardinal sin of our profession, the one thing in our own work that even America’s generous Constitution permits to be punished. So this week I want to talk about what we might practically do to begin to stem the tide of all that lying. (A quick definitional point before we begin: by lying, I mean provable knowing falsity, not mere mistake or rhetorical spin.)

Unanswered calls, unprovoked lies

I was moved to take up this subject by a recent piece in the New York Times. The story, based on painstaking reporting, revealed that FEMA literally failed to answer the vast majority of the phone calls it received on the third and fourth days of the tragic flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Specifically, on the third day the agency answered only 36% of 2300 calls, while on the fourth day, Monday, July 7—the first regular business day after the flooding began—the volume of calls, over ten thousand, was apparently greater than on the three previous days combined, and the proportion for which FEMA simply didn’t answer the phone was about five out of six.

The reason: Kristi Noem, the cabinet secretary who oversees FEMA, had gathered all the agency’s reins into her own hands and then hadn’t bothered to renew the contracts with the people retained to answer calls. Noem didn’t bestir herself to sign the contract until Day 7 of the disaster. In the meantime, she spent part of her afternoon on that crucial fourth day appearing from Washington on Fox News, celebrating her own efforts, and held a Washington news conference on Day 5 touting people’s ability to keep their shoes on in airports.

That’s infuriating enough, but what actually got me was this quote in the fifth paragraph of the story, ahead of the detail on what had actually happened: “‘FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.’” That, of course, is simply not true, as the story amply demonstrated, and as the agency knew from its own data. The quote came from a Noem spokeswoman who at least had the discretion to refuse to let the Times use her name (something to which the paper agreed without explanation).

Journalism in which we let people do this sort of thing isn’t terribly unusual these days—I am not singling out the Times, only using them as an accessible illustration—but practices like this show how much we have lost our way.

What can be done

Let me offer a few simple, but I think important rules we might institute to try to reverse the tide of deceit:

• Stop publishing lies in detail, and demote responses that include lies. It remains critical to seek response from those we write about, and to do so before we publish. Most important, we do this because sometimes responses indicate that reporting was inaccurate or materially incomplete. Even when they do not, fairness—and the appearance of fairness in the eyes of readers, listeners and viewers—dictates that stories reflect comments when they can be obtained. And when the comments are not untrue, they deserve to be prominent in the story. But when they represent lies, they should be stripped of detail (that is, likely paraphrased rather than quoted) and placed following the detailed facts. In the FEMA phone call story, that would have meant moving the response down four paragraphs and reducing it to something like, “A spokeswoman for FEMA denied that calls weren’t answered.” Also, granting anonymity is a courtesy; it shouldn’t be extended to allow people to namelessly lie for their bosses or otherwise out of self interest. Refusing anonymity might actually slightly reduce the incidence of lying in the first place.

• Stop platforming liars. Journalists need to get much more serious about imposing sanctions for lying to us, and using us and our platforms to lie to the public. The simplest place to make a change should be in live interviews and panels. People who are afforded the privilege of unfiltered access to our audiences should be told that lying will result in their simply not being invited back. Ever. Such a rule should be announced publicly, and transparently enforced without exception. (The “transparently” part means publicizing transgressions after the fact when they do occur, naming names and providing explanations for the newsroom’s findings.) If this ends up meaning that some well known public figures (yes, including That One) are no longer welcome in some prominent fora, so be it. My own strong guess is that, after one or two high profile explicated bannings, many interviewees would clean up their acts. They need the eggs.

• The disciplining of liars needs also to extend to the reporting process itself. The best reporters long privately called out sources who misled them. The practice needs to be revived in force, and enforced through active indications of distrust—greater skepticism about stories past liars tout, efforts to quote others in their stead, letting the audience know about their dishonesty where feasible.

The epidemic of lying is by no means confined to Washington or to political life. It may have begun there, but the virus has spread. So the work, and the changes in practice, I have outlined should be something we all consider, wherever we find ourselves. We did not slip into this morass quickly, and we will not be quick in emerging. But I believe that most of us, especially in our own lives, and however fallible we are, continue to believe in the basic decency of the Ninth Commandment’s injunction against falsity. It is a critical measure of desirable workplaces, true friendships and functional families. Helping to restore it to an honored place in public life as well is a worthy goal for journalism.