Just one week into the Trump presidency, the newly inaugurated president and his circle of sycophants are working overtime to convince us that words and facts are meaningless. Sifting through President Trump’s rambling streams of disconnected, fact-less word spills can be discouraging and downright terrifying. When word upon contradictory word spills out in a jumbled torrent of ill-informed grandiosity and juvenile vindictiveness, confusion reigns.

Does anyone believe that this deeply disturbing spectacle of dysfunction at the highest levels of government creates a serious and focused environment for taking on the most difficult and dangerous challenges America and the world face? Job creation, health care, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change – every challenge to our well being and security demands clarity and a mature mindset with the capacity for sifting through the facts and analyzing the nuances of debate.

Unfortunately, the chaotic pattern of pronouncements and then retractions that became the defining character of the first week of the Trump show inspires zero confidence.

Words and facts are foundational. They are what bind us together in common understanding and purpose. Peddling propaganda, falsehoods, and lies undermines our democracy. When words become empty and stripped of coherence or meaning, the essential dialogue necessary for a civil society to define commonly held principles and debate real policy prescriptions is rendered mute.

Whether we are progressives, centrists, conservatives, or members of the far right, we should at least be able to sit down together and agree on what is real and what is fiction.

When Kellyanne Conway paused during an interview on national television and swallowed hard before spewing out the most distortive words spoken by any representative of any administration in recent memory —her farcical “alternative facts”—she dropped a poison pill into our national discourse that will take the collective effort of all of us to expunge.

When White House strategist Stephen Bannon told the New York Times that the media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” his words left no doubt about his disdain for the First Amendment and the press’s solemn obligation to hold the government accountable to the people.

Looking back on the Trump administration’s first shaky week in office, perhaps we should be grateful to Conway and Bannon for ripping down the curtain and pulling out all the stops. Perhaps this early stomach-turning glimpse into the deep cynicism at the core of the Trump administration will be the kick in the gut we all need.

For now we know. Now we can be sure of one indisputable fact: that this administration seeks to redefine our understanding of the words we use and the facts we observe and to use those distortions to bully those who disagree with them into silence.

We cannot let them succeed.

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We have entered the era of “alternative facts.” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, is the person Trump always wants speaking for him when the going gets tough. She was called to come to the rescue on the Sunday morning shows two days after the inauguration. The main question before her was to explain how Press Secretary Sean Spicer had told so many falsehoods in only two days.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, she was asked to explain:

(please excuse NBC’s self-promotion at the beginning of the clip)

MTP Moderator Chuck Todd did not let her off the hook, and ultimately Conway said that Spicer gave “alternative facts.”

Todd tried to pull a “gotcha” on Conway by saying that “Alternative facts are not facts.”

Much as I support Todd’s effort to get Conway to speak truth, I do not agree with his assertion that alternative facts are not facts. The problem with what both Todd and Conway said was that they mistook alternative facts for untrue facts. There are differences and here are some:

Suppose the question is what is the sum of two plus two. If someone says five, that is false. The correct answer is four. But an alternative fact could be that the answer is the square root of sixteen. That would be a different answer, but it would also be right.

Someone can be more creative with alternative facts. Suppose that someone said that Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is not a progressive because he voted against permitting Americans to purchase drugs from Canada (obviously related to the huge contributions he gets from Big Pharma¹). Someone else might say that he is indeed progressive because he received a 95% positive rating in 2015 from the liberal watchdog organization Americans for Democratic Action².

Both facts about Booker are correct. They each describe something that Booker has done, but they paint different pictures of him. Neither of them is false.

There are two keys to accurate reporting.

1. Make sure that the facts that you have are accurate.
2. Put those facts in context. At times, that will mean including what the facts that you have stated do not tell you.

In the case of Cory Booker, it is up to the reader to determine for him or herself if he is progressive, or at least progressive enough to satisfy the reader.

Donald Trump’s latest flirtation with fantasy is his saying that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because three to five million votes that she received were illegally cast. That is patently false.

It does not rise to the level of an alternative fact.

Trump, Spicer and Conway are causing the media to rethink standard reporting. Recently we have heard a number of mainstream outlets begin a report with, “President Donald Trump falsely reported ….” Such an opening was unthinkable, even as recently as six months ago. But times have changed.

It is often difficult for newspapers or electronic media to fully source their facts. One idea that has been presented for newspapers and magazines is to provide footnotes to their reporting. Yes, footnotes. In the printed version of their reporting, that might not be cost-effective as additional space means additional expenses. But on their electronic sites, it could easily be done.

Just to give a sense of what footnotes would look like in an article, I have footnoted below two of the assertions that I previously made about Senator Cory Booker. Feel free to let us know if you think that this method might “have legs.”

¹ In 2014 when Booker successfully ran for the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, he received $388,678 from Pharmaceuticals/Health Products (Source: Open Secrets).

² Reported by Americans for Democratic Action 2015 Congressional Voting Record

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