Don't you dare call the President a liar

Our household has recently been eschewing the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in favor of a pair of back-to-back Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. For a while we'd look at the NewsHour summary and preview of segments for that evening, but the topics of the segments always seemed somewhat irrelevant or off-topic, one way or another. But yesterday I stumbled across some quotes from Jim Lehrer and Ben Bradlee that have solidified my vague sense of irritation and boredom into a somewhat sharper emotion.

The first was from a 6/2/06 interview in Columbia Journalism Review:

JIM LEHRER: [I]f somebody says -- doesn't matter if it's the president or who -- if somebody says, "It rained on Thursday," and you know for a fact it didn't rain on Thursday, ... you would say, "However, according to the weather bureau it didn't." But you don't call the person a liar. ... [T]he person who'd read that story [might] say, "My god, Billy Bob lied." But I'm not doing that. I'm providing the information so that the person can make their decision. People might say, "Well the weather bureau has lied. Or I was out that day and it was raining ...

I'm sure this example sounded a bit less rambling and repetitive in Mr. Lehrer's friendly drawl, but I'm not sure what purpose is served by when a 'journalist' who "know[s] for a fact it didn't rain on Thursday" quotes someone claiming the opposite , without at least pointing out that the statement is, in fact, false. Note that there is a difference between calling someone a liar, which implies knowledge of their thoughts, and describing as statement they made as untrue, which is very different, and (at least sometimes) can be determined unambiguously.

The other quote is actually from Ben Bradlee, but he's talking to Lehrer and Lehrer isn't disagreeing one bit:

BEN BRADLEE: By the seat of their pants, they keep lies out. It's one thing if you know it's a lie. Then you can keep it out.

JIM LEHRER: Sure, just don't run it.

BEN BRADLEE: Just don't run it. But you have to run -- it has become socially proper and right to run what the President of the United States says. And if in the process of that, say, press conference he tells something, he says something that isn't true, you've got to learn how to handle that. You can't come right out, quote the statement and then have a paragraph on your own saying, parenthesis, this is a lie, period.

JIM LEHRER: What do you do?

BEN BRADLEE: Well, you, if it's important enough, you would assign a special story to it and say, when the President said A, he flew in the face of-- there are lots of little euphemisms you can use-- of much of opinion, which says the opposite. And you can highlight the controversy. That seems to me to be quite an intelligent way of doing it.

Note that Bradlee advises against calling the President a liar, but his solution to his lack of mindreading abilities involves characterizing the false statement as "[flying] in the face of ... much of opinion". He completely skips over the possibility of describing the statment as untrue, leaving it in the realm of opinion, which has nothing to do with truth.

I'll stick with Everybody Loves Raymond.

[Source for both quotes : Media Matters]