A lot has been said lately about the deception involving Air Force One - you know, the scheme to get President Trump out of Turkey safely by briefly concealing him in a catering truck and then transferring him to an anonymous Air Force jet.
As a longtime journalist, I of course think that lying to the media is wrong; I want public officials to be truthful, at a minimum. But as a patriotic American, I want our president to be protected from harm. Those two objectives - presidential candor and presidential safety - ought not to be in conflict. We can have both.
To be clear, though, there’s a long tradition of presidential lying in America.
Take President James Polk, who in 1846 wanted a war with Mexico so the U.S. could grab Mexican territory. Polk told a reluctant Congress that Mexico had attacked American troops - “shed American blood on American soil,” he said - which wasn’t true. Polk actually had ordered American troops into Mexico, a provocation that naturally drew a Mexican response. So, we got the Mexican-American War.
And this has gone on and on.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised not to involve America in World War II even as he was secretly plotting war strategy; President Ronald Reagan explicitly said the U.S. had not exchanged “weapons or anything else for hostages,” which he soon had to admit was exactly what he had done. And President Lyndon B. Johnson lied about Vietnam, and President Richard Nixon lied about Watergate, and Bill Clinton lied about his sex life. Long before Donald Trump’s tens of thousands of lies in office, we were well experienced, folks, in presidential prevarication.
But these are changed times. This president lies flagrantly and constantly, about matters both great and inconsequential. Citizens and the news media are different now, too.
Before the 1960s, Americans largely believed their leaders were truthful. And media outlets were pretty deferential: they kept officials’ secrets, and tended to report what officials said as though it was true.
Then, after Vietnam and Watergate, came a severe erosion of public trust, which Reagan exacerbated by attacking government in general. And as investigative journalism took hold, both nationally and in local media, ethics reform became a big deal. Policies were changed; citizens lauded the watchdog role of journalists.
Then three things happened: A more partisan media arose, starting with the intentional conservative bias of Fox News. Second, politicians got more cynical about distorting facts to match their partisan needs. Most significantly, the rise of digital media made the spread of misinformation so much easier, and the survival of aggressive journalism so much harder.
So these days, a more partisan populace tends to believe only what its political champions tell them. The best journalism outlets are more aggressive than ever, with real-time fact-checking and a sense that truth-telling requires calling out deception directly. But information nowadays is often weaponized or dismissed along partisan lines; you know, people believe what they want.
The danger is that when high-level deceptions become commonplace, citizens begin to doubt everything they are told.
Previous administrations have encountered security challenges that demanded secrecy. But they maintained a baseline of trust with the press corps by using background briefings, or back-channel conversations so they weren’t misleading the public. That could have happened here, and should have. But it didn’t. White House reporters were never told they were essentially decoys as the president was winging away on what the Secret Service considered a safer jet. The Trump administration has all but given up any pretense that it cares about the public’s right to know what’s going on.
A persistent pattern of political spin makes it very hard for American citizens and foreign allies alike to separate what might be a real emergency from routine dissembling. And the oversight role of the press - so that Americans and others know what the president is doing - is being undermined.
Yet this elaborate ruse - the shell game of the president’s whereabouts - makes it all the more clear why independent, skeptical reporting remains vital to our democracy.
The Trump administration makes it quite hard to know what’s true. Luckily, there are still a lot of journalists who embrace the hard, and who are dedicated to trying to find the truth, even when the most powerful people on earth are standing in their way. I’d say we ought to be grateful to the truth-tellers.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.