Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism prof, no less, and his PhD student, I presume, Jueni Duyen Tran, have an overall good article at Columbia Journalism Review about whether and how much the media should have explicitly called Donald Trump a liar. (Their argument is that because Trump is indeed often detached from reality, "lie/liar" actually shouldn't be used that often.)
But, re Trump and his reaction to the coronavirus, and his many lies and reality field distortions on this, about halfway down the piece we have:
Similarly, in September 2020, as Bob Woodward published his book Rage and along with it recordings of his interviews with Trump, revealing that the president had knowingly downplayed the pandemic throughout the early months of 2020, the L-word was noticeably absent from the Times’ reporting. In several articles, the paper observed that the president “privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite.” This qualifies as “lying”—even if, as might be argued in this case, there could have been good reason to lie to avoid contributing to a public panic.
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.
This is journalistic malpractice, to put it bluntly. Journalism should NEVER co-sign the old Platonic noble lie. And, we have non-Trumpian evidence of that in the past year.
As noted elsewhere, specifically with Fauci, Platonic noble lies almost always get outed. In Fauci's case, it's led wingnuts to quote Fauci against Fauci.
That said, as per my Merrill Perlman post that's often been the featured post here, this is not the first foul ball from CJR.
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