Poor fact-checkers. The lies coming out of the White House just won’t stop. The Washington Post uses Pinocchios to score just how bad a lie is. They may soon run out of the friendly icons. Politifact may need more Truth-o-meters, especially the Pants-on-fire version.

Things have become so bad that WaPo recently started keeping a running list of Trump’s false claims. Follow it here. It’s updated weekly

In the first 35 days of Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post has counted 140 false or misleading claims. As of Feb. 23, there have been no days without a false or misleading claim.

Almost a fourth of these claims come from Twitter postings, Another fourth from off-the-cuff remarks. Nearly a fifth come from prepared remarks.  That’s a real sign that the deception is intended.

Alternative facts are not facts. Words matter.
The truth matters.

Here are some of the headlines relating to just a few of these false claims, including links to the source and a snippet from the news report. Stay tuned, there will be more.

White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds – CNN, 01/21/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 2]

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, contradicting all available data. Aerial photos have indicated that former president Barack Obama’s first inauguration attracted a much larger crowd. Nielsen ratings show that Obama also had a bigger television audience. Spicer said, without any evidence, that some photos were “intentionally framed” to downplay Trump’s crowd.

Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all. – Washington Post, 01/21/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 2]

Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is — At this point, a visibly exasperated Todd cut in. “Wait a minute. Alternative facts!? Alternative facts!? Four of the five facts he uttered … were just not true. Alternative facts are not facts; they’re falsehoods.”

Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers – New York Times, 01/23/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 4]

President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda.

Recidivism Watch: Spicer uses repeatedly debunked citations for Trump’s voter fraud claims – Washington Post, 01/23/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 4]

Spicer cited repeatedly debunked research to support Trump’s claim that millions of people voted illegally during the 2016 presidential election. These studies do not support Trump’s Four-Pinocchio claims of “millions” of people voting illegally — as we’ve covered here, here, here, here and here.

Kellyanne Conway Admits ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ Error – New York Times, 02/03/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 15]

Kellyanne Conway, the adviser to President Trump who coined the phrase “alternative facts,” is facing another round of criticism and fact-checking after she falsely spoke of a “Bowling Green massacre” by Iraqi refugees. She acknowledged and corrected her statement Friday morning on Twitter.

Trump declares ‘any negative polls are fake news’ – Washington Post, 02/06/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 18]

This is Trump signaling to his supporters that they are to dismiss any bad news about him. Never mind the methodology of a given poll or how Trump is actually doing as president; if something is negative, it has to be wrong. This is at once a completely Trump worldview and also one that would get any student taking Statistics 101 a failing grade.

President Trump is now speculating that the media is covering up terrorist attacks – Washington Post, 02/06/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 18]

Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

President Trump says 109 people were affected by travel ban. It’s at least 60,000 – Politifact, 02/06/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 18]

“I think it was very smooth,” Trump said in part of the interview that aired Feb. 5. “We had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully.”

In Meeting With Sheriffs, Trump Repeats False Murder Rate Statistic – NPR, 02/07/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 19]

At a roundtable meeting with county sheriffs on Tuesday morning, President Trump repeated a false statistic about the U.S. murder rate that he repeatedly deployed on the campaign trail. On multiple occasions Trump has suggested the murder rate is at a historic high, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. In fact, the murder rate is currently at less than half its peak.

Trump cites voter fraud in NH without providing evidence – Washington Post, 02/11/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 23]

President Donald Trump has revived groundless claims of voter fraud, arguing in a lunch meeting with senators that he and former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte would have won in New Hampshire if not for voters bused in from out of state.

Trump Says Refugees Are Flooding U.S. in Misleading Allusion – New York Times, 02/11/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 23]

President Trump said on Saturday that judicial decisions that halted his executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries had allowed a flood of refugees to pour into the country.
“Our legal system is broken!” Mr. Trump wrote in a Twitter posting a day after he said that he was considering a wholesale rewriting of the executive order to circumvent legal hurdles quickly but had not ruled out appealing the major defeat he suffered in a federal appeals court on Thursday. “SO DANGEROUS!” the president added.

Trump statement: News media less trusted than Congress – Politifact, 02/16/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 28]

Trump compared the media with Congress. “You have a lower approval rate than Congress, I think that’s right, I don’t know,” Trump said. “I think they have lower — I heard lower than Congress.”

‘Last Night in Sweden’? Trump’s Remark Baffles a Nation – New York Times, 02/19/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 31]

Swedes reacted with confusion, anger and ridicule on Sunday to a vague remark by President Trump that suggested that something terrible had occurred in their country.
During a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Trump issued a sharp if discursive attack on refugee policies in Europe, ticking off a list of places that have been hit by terrorists. … Sweden, who would believe this?” Not the Swedes.

Trump just said he can’t ‘find a country where we actually do well.’ We just did. – Washington Post, 02/23/17  [Trump Presidency, Day 35]

At a meeting Thursday with the country’s top manufacturing executives, President Trump made a puzzling statement about trade. “We don’t have any good deals. In fact, I am trying to find a country where we actually have a surplus — surplus of trade. Everything is a deficit,” he said. “I actually said to my people: Find a country where we actually do well. So far, we haven’t found that country.” Data from his own federal agencies tell a much different story.

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I don’t get it. Since before kindergarten I was told to pay attention. I guess that the constant reminding finally was pounded in, or more importantly over time the concept seemed to make sense. So when I watch something like a presidential debate, the most I can do is to try to look, listen and hopefully learn.

Not too many years ago, that was what most other debate watchers did, or seemed to do. Maybe they were multi-tasking in ways that included dish-washing, crossword puzzles or folding laundry. But today’s multi-tasking seems unfathomable to me.

How can someone actually be paying attention to the debate and at the same time opining on Twitter or Facebook? This is all done live and there are no built-in “cessation of plays” like with a baseball or football game. I’ve heard that the mind can only concentrate on one thing at a time, but I guess that does not limit it from being like a pinball and going from one direction to another almost instantaneously.

For whatever reason, I seem to be a little skeptical of the instant fact-checking. Yes, when a candidate says something, it is relatively easy to look up whether it is true, false, half-true or pants on fire. But how can someone be researching and confirming this while hearing the next words out of the candidates’ mouths.

Maybe the answer is that it takes a village. One person is carefully listening and shouts out, “Did Trump actually say that more nations should have nuclear weapons” and a second person looks it up. Perhaps it takes a third person to put the answer on social media, and the process continues.

Has debate-watching become corporatized? Or maybe a better question is “has it always been corporatized?” I don’t know. What I do know is that I have always been a member of the Slow Reader Society and that might mean that I’m slow at processing a lot of things.

Well, there’s no sorrow here. I’m comfortable with the lumbering and perhaps old-fashioned way that I do it. But my dream of being a CNN talking head will never come true.

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“Tell the truth.”  “Shame the devil.”

Leave it to one of America’s most respected and incisive journalists, Walter Lippman, to sum up in a few simple words the difficult charge of true journalism.

How well do contemporary journalists live up to Lippman’s expectations?   Let’s just say Mr. Lippman might be more than a bit disappointed, even though by the time of his passing in 1974 he was already declaiming the decline of political coverage in the mass media. Lippman probably wouldn’t be that surprised to see how most of today’s broadcast journalists seem content to simply scratch the surface and fall back on simple-minded slogans.

How often these days do we get raw, unfiltered truth telling?  Not often enough. In the name of phony, balanced coverage (and I’m not just referring to FOX here), the lines between messaging, spin, exaggeration, lying, and outright propaganda have nearly been obliterated. In the process, truth itself has been obliterated.

Truth telling takes courage. It’s risky.  It’s hard work. It’s complicated. Dig deeper, and you don’t know what you’ll find or, more importantly, who you might offend.  Those risks –the devil often bites back, after all—feed into a journalist’s temptation to self-censor. Add into the mix the influence and pressures of corporate ownership and advertising, and you see why truth, uncomfortable facts, and integrity so easily get lost in the shuffle.

When a contemporary journalist pushes back and chooses to answer Lippman’s call, we should take note. Integrity needs to be acknowledged. There are two mainstream broadcast journalists today that I’d nominate for passing the Lippman litmus test:  Bill Moyers, the granddaddy of probing discussion and truth telling, and the newbie, Chris Hayes.

Hayes is the brainy kid squirming on the edge of his seat at the front of the class.  It’s easy to imagine Hayes wildly waving his arms around in his enthusiasm to have the teacher call on him.  He’s jumpy because he’s got something pithy to say that no one else has thought about.  Or if they have, Chris has figured out a more erudite and inclusive way to sum it up.

Recently on his MSNBC weekend program, “Up w/Chris Hayes,” there was a stellar moment that Lippman would certainly have applauded.Hayes was interviewing Mitt Romney’s economic adviser, Emil Henry.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

  Henry took the usual Romney/Republican attack line about Obama’s role in the explosion in the number of individuals and families on SNAP (or food stamps).  There was Hayes, armed with the facts and ready to refute the right-wing meme.  What a joy to watch Hayes calmly explain the facts  (I could hardly believe it!) to Mr. Henry. Watch Henry’s facial expression as Hayes explains that the expansion of SNAP was the result of two factors: increased numbers of people hit hard by the recession and unemployment but also revisions and easing of eligibility requirements that were put into place during (yes, believe it!) the Bush administration. If that’s not enough, Hayes goes on to point out that Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan had himself voted for the changes to eligibility.

Shaming the devil, indeed. During his preparation for the show, Hayes must have suspected Mr. Henry might jump in with the SNAP attack line.  Hayes and his staff took the time to dig around a bit.  By the time Henry was sitting in his East Hampton living room chatting with Hayes, there were the uncomfortable facts squirming around in Hayes’ back pocket, ready to jump out. Hayes could hardly suppress his delight. Contrast that moment with what happens most of the time on other news shows. How many times a day do other phony journalists let false claims float by them because they just don’t know the facts or haven’t bothered to look them up?

That brings me to Bill Moyers. If ever there was a survivor of the consequences of hard truth in broadcasting, it’s Moyers. Moyers’ battles with corporate broadcasting executives over content are legend.  If Hayes is the brilliant geek in the class, then Moyers is the wizened teacher up there at the blackboard. With a communication style of stern, truth-telling and probing questions delivered in a soft, reassuring voice, Moyers is the Mister Rogers of the journalism world. Like Fred Rogers, Moyers is a humanitarian missionary in the cause of truth. In fact, the two sermonizing broadcasters shared training as ordained ministers—Moyers as a Baptist and Rogers as a Presbyterian. The two share not only a communication style but a steely core beneath a deceptively soft exterior that never fails to communicate their shared faith in the moral underpinnings of every human endeavor—whether it be in politics or child’s play.

On September 14, 2012, Moyers hosted a segment on his “Moyers & Company” show called “The One Percent Court,” based on an article by the same title in The Nation. Featured were Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, and legal scholar, and Maryland state senator Jamie Raskin.  Watch Moyers, our master journalist, as he gently but firmly shapes an in-depth conversation about the state of our current and future Supreme Court.

Lippman would have approved.

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Distressed that NBC’s Meet the Press has devolved into a platform for unchallenged, incorrect statements by politicians, two college students have launched a website called “Meet The Facts.”

For Washington insiders and political junkies far beyond the Beltway, Meet the Press (MTP) was once must-see Sunday-morning tv, where politicians and policymakers could expect to face tough questions and often-uncomfortable follow-ups. (Trivia note: MTP is the longest-running show on television, founded in 1947.)  More recently, though, the hot seat has cooled considerably, and guests regularly get away with canned talking points, obfuscations and downright falsehoods, say media watchers. [Case in point: Karl Rove’s MTP performance on March 14, 2010.]

The founders of Meet the Facts are Paul Breer, a political science student in Kansas, and Chas Danner, a journalism student in New York City. The statement that launched their effort came from David Gregory, the host of Meet the Press. Responding to the news that ABC’s rival program, This Week, has contracted with Politifact for fact-checking, Gregory said that MTP was not about to hire a fact-checker. “People can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms,” said Gregory.

Breer and Danner met on Facebook and agreed that there was something seriously wrong with that notion. “Who holds politicians accountable for the statements they make on television?” they ask on their website. “According to host David Gregory: not Meet the Press. Fact checking is one of the primary functions of journalism, but Mr. Gregory has said that it’s up to the viewers to determine fact from fiction.”

“We and this campaign are not affiliated with any organization. Although we are both Democrats (yes they have those in Kansas) – that does not and will not impact this non-partisan effort in any way. We have invested $10 (domain name) and some hard work,” they say.

Meet The Facts is a non-partisan grassroots effort to encourage the NBC television program Meet The Press to incorporate a formal fact checking procedure for all statements made on air by its guests. That analysis would then be released to the public, preferably within several days of the broadcast.

This campaign is not about attacking Meet the Press or its staff, but rather about holding the program/brand to a higher standard – one that at present it is not itself meeting. Furthermore, we think “Meet The Facts” is a pretty catchy name. If NBC News and the staff of Meet The Press agree to permanently institute a public fact checking system for everything guests say on the air, we think they should absolutely name that feature “Meet the Facts” and we will gladly transfer over the domain name, Twitter username, and Facebook page username for their use, and at no cost.

We look forward to a time when If It’s Sunday It’s Meet The Press – but politicians beware, come Monday, it’s Meet The Facts.

In my personal view, one can only speculate on the reasons behind the change from hard to soft at Meet the Press. Surely, it’s not because we’re living in a kinder, gentler political era. A more likely explanation is that NBC, in the quest for viewers, ratings and advertisers, has lost its nerve and fears that making politicians uncomfortable could result in reduced access to newsmakers. A recent article by media-monitor Howard Kurtz describes host David Gregory’s enthusiasm about the new Meet the Press stage set scheduled for launch on May 2. The set features a backdrop of bookcases, ostensibly aimed at lending an air of gravitas. I hope that the books in the background will inspire fact-checking of information in the foreground.

(MTP) was once must-see Sunday-morning tv, where politicians and policymakers could expect to face tough questions and often-uncomfortable follow-ups. (Trivia note: MTP is the longest-running show on television, founded in 1947.)  More recently, though, the hot seat has cooled considerably, and guests regularly get away with canned talking points, obfuscations and downright falsehoods, say media watchers. [Case in point: /em

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