Reporting the Truth When Politicians Lie

"When President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of false statements about climate change during his September 23 speech to the UN General Assembly, he made headlines around the world. Mocking climate change as a "con job" promoted by "stupid people," Trump's remarks also illustrated a dilemma facing journalism's traditional approach to covering politics, where not appearing to take sides has long been a cardinal rule. As more and more political leaders and movements mirror Trump's habit of making factually inaccurate claims, a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism offers a fresh way to think about this dilemma, along with a host of practical tools for tackling it."

""Populist politicians are rewriting the rules, and we [journalists] keep giving them oxygen," writes Michael Hauser Tov, a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in the report, called "Reporting populism: the harm-reduction playbook." Parker Molloy, an American journalist whose Substack The Present Age covered the report shortly after its release, praised Tov for recognizing that "the normal rules of political coverage don't work anymore. Ignoring provocative statements lets them spread unchecked. Covering them neutrally amplifies them and creates a false sense of legitimate debate.""

"Some of the coverage of Trump's UN speech had exactly the latter effect. In a nine-minute video package, the BBC did not include a sentence correcting Trump's climate inaccuracies. The broadcaster's only hint about the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and its devastating impacts on people and economies was to note that Trump's remark was "met with gasps across the assembly floor.""

Populist politicians increasingly make factually inaccurate claims that challenge traditional journalistic neutrality and enable misinformation to spread. Neutral coverage or failure to correct falsehoods amplifies misleading narratives and creates a false sense of legitimate debate. Harm-reduction reporting strategies propose proactive corrections, context-providing, limiting amplification of provocative false frames, and deploying practical tools to reduce public exposure to harmful falsehoods. Examples show major outlets sometimes omit corrections, allowing misinformation to gain traction. Adopting harm-reduction techniques can reduce the reach and perceived legitimacy of false claims while maintaining accountability and informative public discourse.

Read at The Nation