Truth telling

There was a headline yesterday, the day after the big U.S. presidential debate, that made me despair of being a human being in the 21st century. I guess to be precise, it was a tagline underneath a headline, but it was no less depressing for being in a smaller font. The tagline wasn’t found on some trashy tabloid website where you would expect to find a predictable parade of click-baiting garbage. No, this was a national mainstream media article. The offending sentence read thus:

Find Out Who Lied About What and Why

Perhaps you’re wondering why this sentence would provoke such a strong reaction. It was an article that was ostensibly about fact-checking, after all, and we should all be grateful that there are people out there who are able and willing to wade through the bile served up by politicians on a daily basis in the service of truth and accountability. Or, in the case of Donald Trump, that there are people willing to attempt to decode the chaotic, stream-of-consciousness assemblage of syllables and outbursts that passes for speech to find something resembling coherent truth claims to check.