I didn’t know there was an annual awards show for weasel words in journalism, but there must be, because what else could explain this headline? Clearly NPR is trying to get their “Weasel Words Headline of the Year” entry in under the wire, before 2022 comes to a close.
And I’ve gotta say, this is an excellent candidate. In just 12 words, NPR scored a weasel trifecta:
- They’re not reporting whether George Santos lied—that would require actually reporting on the truth, something they must never, ever do, lest they fail to consider “both sides” of an issue. No, they’re reporting on what “some say” about George Santos’s lies.
- And they’re not saying he lied, but rather that he “lied.” So maybe he kinda sorta lied, but not really. They can’t commit to calling a lie a lie, so better put that word “lied” in quotes.
- Specifically, what’s important is not whether Santos lied, or even whether those lies are widely acknowledged as such, but what Republicans say about the lies.
The article uses just about every synonym for “lie” in the thesaurus, outside of quoting one Republican source. There’s “misled,” “deceptions,” “none of that is true,” and “his claim...was false.”
We’re now at the end of 2022, over seven years since Donald Trump came down the escalator and began an unending Gish Gallop of headline-garnering lies. In that time, many journalists, even in the traditional media, have learned to get out of their both-sidesism comfort zone and call a lie a lie. Here, George Santos has made false statements about substantive aspects of his background, knew those statements were false when he made them, and their falsehood has been well established. But NPR still can’t bring themselves to state directly that he lied.