Liar, Liar, World on Fire

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell, 1984

You know it’s getting bad when the Orwell quotes start recirculating.

With the doublespeak pouring out of the White House briefing room, the Trump regime produces Orwellian moments on the daily. 

But the first two weeks of 2026 have brought us to a new nadir: the coup in Venezuela, the memory-holing on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and now Renee Good, the Minnesota mother that an ICE agent executed for the capital crime of talking back.

The video evidence of Good’s murder is undeniable. This could be one of those breakthrough moments — like photos of Emmett Till’s open casket, video of the LAPD beating Rodney King or cellphone footage of George Floyd’s suffocation — that reshape public consciousness and drive political and societal change. 

When we can all see what happened with our own eyes, it’s hard to understand why so much of the media can’t do the same. Instead, major newsrooms have obscured and equivocated, allowing Trump officials to slander Good, call her a “domestic terrorist” and dispute the obvious facts.

When the president says “2 + 2 = 5,” the media’s answer can’t be a he-said-she-said debate over “Trump’s new math.”

Yet too many outlets are still failing this basic test, if not actively joining the cover-up of the Trump regime’s crimes and corruption. 

Accountability requires the media willing to call a lie a lie. And the Trump regime has learned they usually won’t.

Hiding the administration’s lies about Renee Good

Media critic Dan Froomkin wrote an excellent piece on his Press Watch site about the mainstream media’s continued failure to meet this moment. Many reporters at major outlets did crucial work interviewing witnesses and closely examining the video of Good’s murder to show what actually happened. But instead of proven facts, to the editors  “of our major newsrooms, the truth of the matter is a jump ball.”

Froomkin cites the stumbling both-sidesism in headlines like “Officials dispute Noem’s claims after woman fatally shot by ICE in Minneapolis” (The Washington Post), “Minnesota Officials Dispute Federal Accounts of Fatal ICE shooting” (The New York Times) and “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test” (the Times again).

When Trump officials slandered Good and made blatantly false claims about her actions before the shooting, much of the coverage devolved into partisan bickering that obscured or downplayed the fact that the nation’s top government officials were lying to cover up a horrific crime.

The ultimate sycophants

As Froomkin notes, there’s a lot of handwringing in elite journalism circles about how and why the media lost the public’s trust. Culture warriors including CBS censor-in-chief Bari Weiss and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr seize on this distrust to disparage critical coverage of the Trump administration and claim the media is out of touch with “ordinary Americans.”

Opportunists like Weiss and new CBS Evening News anchor Tony “We Love America” Dokoupil are all too “willing to bend journalistic ethics out of all recognizable shape to avoid provoking a hostile administration,” to quote Columbia Journalism Review’s Jem Bartholomew.

This approach means Weiss spiking a 60 Minutes story about Trump kidnapping innocent people and sending them to be tortured in El Salvador and burying another that exposed Trump’s decision to accept white — and only white — South African refugees. But it also looks like a bunch of softball interviews with Trump mouthpieces that included embarrassing tributes to Marco Rubio as the “ultimate Florida man.”

“Demanding accountability is increasingly seen as disloyalty, rather than the duty of the Fourth Estate,” Bartholomew writes. “It feels like sycophancy, not rigor, is what now reaps rewards.”

But these propagandists aren’t the only participants in the cover-up, even if others make their political allegiances less obvious. “Right this moment, in newsrooms all across the country, there are untold Bari Weisses preaching the doctrines of high journalism while quietly going about the work of making the actual journalism suck,”  writes Defector’s Tommy Craggs in his blistering takedown of the state of “prestige journalism.”

A matter of trust

Far too many journalists have internalized the right-wing critique that their audiences are losing interest in the news because coverage is too liberal or “woke.” Newsroom leaders police their newsrooms and their reporters’ social-media accounts for telltale signs of activism or political opinions. (To be clear: These rules apply only to workers and never their billionaire bosses.)

But this is a self-serving misdiagnosis of how trust actually devolves. Most people distrust the media not because it’s too liberal but because it’s irrelevant to their lives. They distrust the media because it doesn’t reflect — or actively misrepresents — their communities. They distrust the media — and politicians, too — because they’re not telling the truth about what’s happening right in front of them.  

As Froomkin writes: “I think nothing makes people lose trust in news organizations as much as when they’ve seen something with their own eyes — and then see news coverage that doesn’t comport with what they themselves experienced.”

About those lies

I once got into an argument at a journalism conference during Trump’s first term with a top NPR editor about the network’s refusal to use the word “lie” when Trump was obviously lying. What he fundamentally failed to understand — and what too many newsrooms refuse to learn — is that failing to call out lies, big and small, is actually what creates distrust with their audience.

It’s pretty simple: People hate being lied to. If you know someone’s lying to me but won’t tell me, why would I ever trust you? 

Yet editors cling to “objectivity” to the point of incoherence and irrelevance. At this point any newsroom unwilling to go after the liars is unequipped for this moment and putting all of us in greater danger.

“Trump’s lies, big and small, from the seemingly existential to the banal, have brought untold damage to communities and often serve as the pretext to usher in more aggressive MAGA policy stances,” my colleague Nora Benavidez wrote. “The resulting chaos overwhelms the public, distracts the media and undermines democratic progress.”

When the liars aren’t confronted, the lies continue to accumulate, compound and metastasize — as they have from birth certificates to ballot boxes to the attempted cover-up of this brutal murder in Minneapolis.

At the end of Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith surrenders to Big Brother. But we still have the chance to rewrite our story. As Orwell himself said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

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