What If We Decided Lying Was Obscene?

from my scratch pad

A new nonprofit news organization called NOTUS¹ recently reached out to me and a bunch of other former Washington Post writers to ask: What would we change about D.C. journalism? (In 100 words or so, please.)

There’s nothing more energizing than a big question coupled with a small word count. So I thought about what drives me crazy about the news these days² and I came up with this:³

My fellow respondents had some great ideas. I agree, for example, with Jonathan Capehart’s notion that opinion writers should continually evaluate the facts and interrogate our own beliefs. Changing our minds should be a point of pride, not a cause of embarrassment.

Most proposed changes were extremely practical. Bleeping lies, on the other hand, would never happen. I know that. But . . .

Some of my favorite pieces I wrote for the Post asked readers to imagine an alternate reality. One where politicians got a credibility score decided by an accredited team of fact-checkers. One where the news media expressed a running Covid death toll as two numbers: vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. One where we spoke of abortion as a “reset” for unwillingly pregnant people, a health measure that restored them to their previously scheduled lives.

It’s not that I thought we would do these things. I just think it’s good practice to imagine them, imagine if we could completely erase the current way things are and start over.

What would you do, if you could design news from scratch?

1. Thank you to Perspective editor Richard Just for this tasty prompt.

2. Yep, I completely ignored the “D.C.” part.

3. Actually, I was first going to write about how, like health care, journalism is incompatible with capitalism, and all news organizations should be nonprofit, but that seemed a little obvious?