Gullixson: Pushing back against President-elect Trump’s ‘truthiness’

“There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.”

- Scottie Nell Hughes, conservative commentator and political editor at RightAlerts.com on NPR Wednesday.

Is truth the biggest casualty of the presidential election? Based on the discourse of the past few weeks, that would appear to be the case.

Take the quote above from Scottie Nell Hughes, someone who is considered a member of the news media for reasons that are not exactly clear. She has been, and remains, primarily a breathless defender and surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump.

During an interview with Diane Rehm on Wednesday on National Public Radio, Hughes defended Trump's groundless Twitter claims that he won the Electoral College “in a landslide” and that he would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the popular vote were it not for “millions of people who voted illegally.” Later, our Twitter-pated president-elect further observed that there was “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California,” something that election officials in all three states have strongly refuted.

Respected author James Fallows, also a guest on the show, noted some of the president-elect's more famous falsehoods, adding that “in contrast to all political coverage in my lifetime, even Richard Nixon, I think the starting point for most press coverage is that there's no presumption that anything Donald Trump says is true.”

Shortly thereafter, Hughes responded with the gem of Orwellian logic quoted above, adding, “And so Mr. Trump's tweet amongst a certain crowd - a large part of the population - are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some amongst him and his supporters (who) believe they have facts to back that up.”

But there are no facts to back them up. There is only a strong desire to believe that supporting facts exist, which appears to be, in Hughes' view, self-authenticating.

The response by Glenn Thrush, senior political correspondent from Politico, was priceless and appropriate.

“First I've got to pick my jaw up off the floor here,” he said. “There are no objective facts? I mean, that is - that is an absolutely outrageous assertion.”

Not only is there no evidence of illegal voting in this election, Thrush said, but an exhaustive study by the Pew Research Center in 2012 found the number of proven incidents of vote fraud in this country are so few and far between that people have a far better chance “of being struck by lightning than voting illegally in an election.”

But Hughes refused to budge. And so it goes.

It's episodes like this that have prompted some readers to ask what I think the next four years hold for the news media, how newspapers will respond to a president who has waged war against them for much of the past 18 months. These battles have included the revocation of press credentials from newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, that offend him, threats to change the nation's libel laws to free Trump up to sue newspapers into submission and, of course, name calling. He has referred to the media as “scum,” “lowlifes” and “worthless,” to name a few of his epithets.

Despite all that, I find the question about how newspapers will respond somewhat discouraging, if only for the fact that some seem to believe that the role of newspapers is pliable.

That's simply not true. Newspapers can no more adjust their role than we can change the weather.

Journalists, at least those who are worth their salt, know only one responsibility and that is to report the truth - to present facts and then defend them, question them, correct them, if necessary, and then do it all again the next day.

It's true we don't always get it right. And, yes, there are real concerns about the long-term financial viability of the print media in particular. But I don't know anyone in this profession who would be willing to trade one day of their abiding obligation to accuracy for a year of profitability. We present the story, the truth to the best of our ability. Hopefully, readers are willing to read it and engage with it and, God willing, pay for it. But, in the end, that is out of our control.

All we would ask is that the public be discerning about where their information comes from and who they regard as the “news media.” Don't lump us in with websites that are paid to incite audiences or offer content that fuel entrenched perspectives. And don't group us with cable networks where talking heads are paid to yell at one another and where the boundaries between news and opinion have long since been blurred.

I would ask the same discernment of our president-elect, but I see little hope of him either changing his mind or his source of news. His evidence of widespread voter fraud, for example, apparently comes from Infowars.com, a site run by a radio commentator who loves to promote conspiracy theories, like how the U.S. government was secretly behind the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks.

Hughes, for example, works for a website that offers a front-page link to a petition to fire House Speaker Paul Ryan for “disloyalty” for how he has treated Trump. It's no wonder that, to her, facts no longer exist.

So, speaking on behalf of most journalists I know, no, our role is not going to change. Facts still exist, and we will report them.

Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, said it best last week in accepting the second-annual Hitchens Prize for journalism. Baron said he long held onto a letter from a priest who had waged a lonely internal campaign against child abuse and cover-ups within the Boston Catholic Archdiocese before Baron and his staff of reporters from the Boston Globe shed light on the scandal. (Baron was portrayed by actor Liev Schreiber in the movie “Spotlight” that depicted this coverage.)

“This nightmare would have gone and on were it not for you and the Globe staff,” Father Thomas P. Doyle wrote. “I assure you that what you and Globe have done for the victims, the church and society … will reverberate for decades.”

“There is a lesson in Father Doyle's letter,” Baron said last week. “The truth is not meant to be hidden. It is not meant to be suppressed. It is not meant to be ignored. It is not meant to be disguised. It is not meant to be manipulated. It is not meant to be falsified. Otherwise, wrongdoing will persist.”

True enough. And given how things are going, that's something we should all keep in mind over the next four years.