Media big-wigs of the MSM are finally circling around to reality journalism of calling Republican lies as ‘lies,’ and not ‘falsehoods, or ‘inaccurate claims,’ or some such nonsense, but f*cking-ass lying. The process has been long in coming and should have been a part of proper reporting for years.

Not only of the natural-as-breathing liar T-Rump, but the entire Republican apparatus has donned the cloak of the lie as party policy and apparently the media folks are finally catching on:

Whatever the reasons — or excuses — they are now squarely fixed on a fact that could have been discovered a long time ago. To be a Republican in good standing requires participation, or at least acquiescence in monstrous lies that poison our politics. 3/ https://t.co/2rrwvPv0Om

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 10, 2021

The Associated Press story Rosen noted in his tweet above calls it as it is:

Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans.

Trump’s discredited allegations about a stolen election did nothing to save his presidency when courtrooms high and low, state governments and ultimately Congress — meeting in the chaos of an insurrection powered by his grievances — affirmed the legitimacy of his defeat and the honesty of the process that led to it.

Now those “Big Lie” allegations, no closer to true than before, are getting a second, howling wind.

Republicans are expected to believe the falsehoods, pretend they do or at bare minimum not let it be known that they don’t. State Republican leaders from Georgia to Arizona have been flamed by Trump or his followers for standing against the lies.

An whole GQP has lost its collective soul in backing pure bullshit: ‘The root cause of all of these events — the original sin — was an incumbent president of the United States, Donald Trump, who refused to concede an election he lost.‘

Twist of history, too, journalism nearly 50 years ago led to the ouster of a president, but in these following years the tie between media and power have become intertwined and nearly have become one. Especially with the arrival of the T-Rump and the uptick in a crazed news cycle that reporting forums felt a certain gush to its business and lost the will to call a spade a spade — or a lie as a lie.
Maybe the media cloaked themselves in a siege mentality with the ‘enemy of the people’ bullshit, and although there have been good journalism practiced in the T-Rump era, the ablitity for self-criticism got lost amidst the ‘bothsidesism’ crap when it was way-obvious that way-wasn’t the case.

In context, Eric Boehlert’s PressRun this morning discussed the reporting-media’s shift to proclaiming the lie instead of some other watered-down word/s — horrible it’s taken so long for the coin to drop:

With a quick succession of headlines last week, the New York Times quietly unveiled a new chapter in its Trump coverage — the paper was suddenly calling out his lies.

“In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies,” a Times headline read.
The next day, the Times published, “Cheney’s Replacement Repeats Trumps Lies as Party Looks Ahead.” (In a nostalgic twist, the online headline for that article referred to “False Claims.”)
And the following day, a print subhead for a front-page Times article read, “Party Is Banking On Pushing Elections Lies.”

The good news: Beltway journalists no longer seeking access to the Trump White House are now detailing his “lies” in news coverage:

• “The 15 Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump’s Presidency” (CNN)

• “Legacy of Lies — How Trump Weaponized Mistruths During His Presidency” (ABC News)

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported, “Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans.”

The bad news: The press should have been doing this for the last four years.
Instead, they played purposeful semantics games. Burning through the thesaurus, journalists opted for watered-down phrases such as “falsehoods,” “false claims,” “inaccurate claims,” “alternative facts,” “alternative reality,” “unsupported claim,” and “erroneous description.”

It was a deliberate decision to turn away from the truth — and from accurate language — while covering the most dangerous president in American history.
Afraid that calling Trump a “liar” in straight news reports would spark cries of “liberal media bias,” the press capitulated.
In the process, Trump used his avalanche of untruths to chip away at our democratic institutions.

Only now the shift:

When Trump lied without pause during his presidential debates with Joe Biden last year, it was crickets from the press.
When Trump spent most of 2020 lying about every aspect of a public health crisis, we never saw a single “Trump Lies About Pandemic” news headline from a major news organization.
In office, Trump lied about doctors trying to “execute” healthy newborn babies in the delivery room.
Trump even lied about 9/11, and lied during an address to West Point cadets, and the press let him.

Boehlert concluded the whole shebang is ‘the definition of institutional failure.’

The true victim is America and its democratic principles — Eugene Robinson’s lede in The Wshington Post this morning nailed the state-of-affairs: ‘The greatest threat to our nation’s future is not covid-19 or the rise of China or even the existential challenge of climate change. It is the Republican Party’s attempt to seize and hold power by offering voters the seductive choice of rejecting inconvenient facts and basic logic.‘

And so it goes…

(Illustration found here).