They Cannot Call Him Liar

FAIR -- "Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed," legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone once noted.

That's advice that latter-day reporters might ponder as they twist themselves into knots trying to avoid saying that George W. Bush lied in his State of the Union address when he said that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--a claim that the U.S. government had debunked in February 2002, almost a year before Bush's speech (New York Times, 7/6/03).

Though warned by the CIA that the charge was bogus--the main evidence turned out to be a clumsy forgery (New Yorker, 3/26/03)--the White House put it in the speech anyway, arguing that it was true that Britain was making the claim. But the key word in Bush's sentence is "learned"; as Michael Kinsley pointed out (Slate, 7/14/03), "it certainly is not possible to say that someone has 'learned' a piece of information without clearly intending to imply that you, the speaker, wish the listener to accept it as true."

The idea that you can make a falsehood true by attributing it to someone else was endorsed by some journalists. "The statement in the president's speech was technically correct since it accurately quoted the British paper," said David Martin on the CBS Evening News (7/10/03). Such reporters are in for a shock if they try to use that defense in a libel trial.

The word "lie," of course, is one that media are generally reluctant to use in connection with a powerful U.S. politician--particularly if the lie involves state policy and not personal sleaze.