Remember way, way back, five or six months ago, when you couldn’t read a news story about Donald Trump’s challenge to last year’s election results without its being qualified, usually in the very headline, as “false” or “unfounded”? Soon the claim of electoral fraud became known in media shorthand as Mr. Trump’s “Big Lie”—presumably to distinguish it from the 30,572 lesser lies supposedly told during his four years in office, according to the comically misnamed Washington Post “fact-checkers”—with no further description necessary. I always thought this a poor, self-discrediting strategy by the Trump-loathing media. To anyone not already as Trump-hostile as The Washington Post, the “Big Lie” topos must have sounded like protesting too much. If we had to be told every time that any questioning of the election results was a lie, maybe that was because there were good reasons, never mentioned by the reporters, for believing that it was not a lie.

Moreover, as with Jim Rutenberg’s notorious announcement in August 2016 of The New York Times’s open hostility to the Trump campaign and candidacy—which obviously carried over to his presidency—the value of reporting on the “Big Lie,” ostensibly as information, had to be discounted by readers’ knowledge of its tainted source, which had already advertised itself as being hostile and therefore unfair to the alleged liar. Well, maybe it was a lie, but we know from long experience of the dubious “lies” catalogued by the fact-checkers that the Post