Deliberate falsehoods

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,...