Editorial: Choose truth as a standard

Perhaps you know the old saying: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” a line typically attributed to Winston Churchill.

This sad truth has manifested itself in the “post fact” landscape of our 2016 election cycle. Folks, it’s time for the truth to get its pants on faster.

Lies have always been part of politics. But with technology they move faster than ever, from more sources than ever. And you’d better believe unsavory operatives use this to their advantage.

Donald Trump certainly has. Never in our memory has a major politician been so indifferent to the truth. Somehow, it has helped him crack the code of modern media and politics.

That Hillary Clinton lacks in trustworthiness is a concern as well, but there is no comparison between the way she conducts herself and how Mr. Trump carries on. The verdict came back “mostly false” or worse for some 70 percent of the Trump statements PolitiFact checked this cycle.

How did we get to a place where this is acceptable to so many people in a presidential nominee? A rolling snowball of smaller failures. A media appetite for simple narratives and lazy horse race coverage. The easy financial returns of click bait journalism. The unwillingness to read, with an open mind, news that doesn’t fit within the bubble of our own beliefs, a mindset empowered by social media.

We arrived here on the lack of respect that Republicans showed the nation’s first black president. We are reaping a crop sown by politicians who pandered to tea party partisans, knowing their goals were not eminently achievable. We are in the fallout created by members of the conservative media who got rich stoking fear.

Anger. Disbelief. Stubbornness. A racism borne in part of being told that others are to blame. Too many on the right wound this machine. Now too many are afraid to speak against it.

Charlie Sykes, the conservative radio host in Wisconsin, drove some of these points last month. Conservatives, legitimately upset with the leftward lean of so much media, did a remarkable job of attacking it, he said.

“But perhaps what we did was also then to destroy any sense of a standard,” Sykes said. “Who are the referees? Where do you go to basically say, this is the truth?”

What now? We would prefer that people simply stop lying. We would like to see an educated population too savvy to fall for fake news written to inspire clicks by confirming their fears.

But you will starve of oxygen holding your breath for a perfect world.

The press must rededicate itself, this newspaper included. We are thankful for readers who call and write, noting our mistakes, questioning our biases.

We call on the national press to dial down the horse race coverage, punditry and winner/loser analysis. Focus on policy analysis and fact checking, and perhaps the occasional insult so that people will actually read your stories.

We want to see live fact checking on screen during debates. We suggest occasional breaks in the questioning to lay the most important results before candidates, and viewers.

And though we focus today mostly on presidential politics, this issue is broader. Government officials must realize they operate now in a world of instant information. Law enforcement in particular must prioritize public safety and community morale during tense investigations and release information as quickly as possible to avoid breeding mistrust and empowering rumor.

So much dialogue now occurs online, and we hope people will make a point of friending and following those whose politics they do not share. Keep an open mind, a cynical eye and a civil tone.

We are all the gatekeepers now. Politely suggest to your Aunt Sally that the websites she links may not be trustworthy. Inform your old high school friends that their online racism is misguided and unwelcome.

We are encouraged, slightly, that Mr. Trump’s say-anything strategy is unlikely to peel enough voters away to bring him victory in the coming general election. But the election is not yet here. And what of next time?

To close with another quotation, this one from the 1963 Paul Newman movie Hud: “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

Surely there are truthful men and women left to admire. Surely, together, we are shrewd enough to find them, if only we will be less willing to be lied to.