He assured us that if we were vaccinated, the chances were near zero that we would get sick enough to have to be hospitalized. He told us that he “ wouldn’t demand that be mandatory.” That was before he thought they should be mandatory. That wasn’t true, either.īefore that, Biden told us that the surging number of migrants we were witnessing at our country’s southern border was nothing out of the ordinary. He told us that our allies had no problem with our hasty departure from Afghanistan. It didn’t look that way in the events that played out on television. He told us that he planned for every contingency in the lead-up to our departure. 31), we’re gonna stay to get them all out.” That wasn’t true. troops from Afghanistan, President Biden assured us that “if there’s American citizens left (on Aug. So, what did we get with Joe Biden? Honesty? Accuracy? The truth? Or just more of the same? One of the reasons Trump lost his re-election bid is that the American people were tired - not only of the daily chaos and his non-stop tweets, but they knew he made up a lot of things and they lost trust in him. The Washington Post counted those times and concluded that Trump’s “ false or misleading claims total 30,573 over four years.” How many times, when they weren’t describing what he said as an outright “lie,” did they report that he had “no evidence” to back up whatever he had just said? How many times did they say his words were “false or misleading”?Īctually, that’s not a rhetorical question. If we can’t trust the president, how do we know what to believe? How do we know what our government is really up to? People in power must be held accountable in a democracy - but that’s not easy when you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.Īnd unless you were asleep during the Trump presidency, you surely noticed that there was no hesitation on the part of journalists to call out his misstatements. In a free country such as ours, dishonesty at the highest levels of government is no small thing. Donald Trump didn’t invent “fake news” or fake information, but you could make a case - and his detractors pretty much have - that he made Pinocchio look like Honest Abe by comparison. I’ve been a full-time working journalist since the late 1960s - and even I don’t know what to believe anymore.īut journalists aren’t the only ones who make us doubt the information we’re getting from people in important places. So who knows if what my friends just heard on TV or read in a news story is really true? Many journalists, for a while now, haven’t been shy about revealing their biases. Unfortunately, they’re asking legitimate questions. Did such-and-such really happen? Did so-and-so really say what they heard attributed to him on the news? These people aren’t paranoid. It’s not unusual for acquaintances to ask me if what they just heard on the news or read online is true.
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