How media technology and Donald Trump have changed the way journalists think about describing falsehoods

Questioning a sitting president’s truthfulness and actually using the words “lie,” “lied,” or “lying” has often been relegated to the opinion pages, editorials, or put in quotation marks: Let somebody else suggest the chief executive is lying about Yalta, or Cuba, or Vietnam, or trading arms for hostages, or “no new taxes,” or sexual relations with that woman, or weapons of mass destruction. This is the stuff of standard journalistic fairness. The standard, however, is coming under pressure. Not just by the bombastic new president of the United States and his famous tendency to exaggerate, but by that president’s embrace of new-age publishing technology and his over-the-top disdain for journalism at a frenetic moment for the media industry.

Newsrooms have wrestled with how to characterize the misinformation Donald Trump spreads since the presidential campaign, when his eyebrow-raising statements tended more toward “pants on fire” than true, according to at least one fact-checking site. This challenge is only intensifying with Trump in the Oval Office, and backed by an administration eager to provide “alternative facts” when the actual facts don’t flatter the president.