FROM THE EDITOR: Lying used to have a cost, but not anymore

Who ever thought they'd see the day that checking facts would become unwelcome?

Few things that we publish in the Billings Gazette generate more furor than a fact-checking , and we ran a bunch of them throughout this last election cycle.

When President Joe Biden told the whopper that inflation was 9% when he came into office, we ran a fact-check story saying that wasn't true. When Donald Trump said he had been to Gaza, we fact-checked that, too. He hasn't been there.

Tim Walz didn't misspeak when he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square uprising, he lied. And, Kamala Harris lied about cutting the flow of fentanyl in half. Jon Tester was wrong about Tim Sheehy's health care plan and Sheehy was wrong about Tester voting to give health care to illegal immigrants. And three of JD Vance's lies were so egregious, the fact-checking site PolitiFact rated them at "pants on fire."

All of those lies and half-truths, and many others, were pointed out in Billings Gazette fact-checking s. And, nearly all of those s drew complaints from Gazette readers.

A few of those readers said fact-checking s shouldn't run at all: "What business does the media have in telling people what to believe or not believe" one reader told me. Others felt like their favored politicians were unfairly being fact-checked while opposing politicians were given a pass. And, one reader told me, it's the fact-checkers who lie.

All of the objectors, when challenged, said they of course valued facts, and that "common sense" alone, not fact-checkers, was enough to figure out the important stuff.

And, sure, some political lies are mostly harmless. When Trump says 30,000 people attended one of his rallies in Dallas, in a venue that holds 10,000, who cares? But when politicians lie again and again about the 2020 election being stolen, that weakens democracy.

The weird thing is, while every one of the readers I talked to acknowledged that their favored politician lies, they also bristled with defensiveness when one of those lies was pointed out. "All politicians lie," they all told me. "It's just part of the game."

That's true, it is part of the game, but should it be? How in the world did we become so accepting of lying in politics? It's everywhere, and it costs politicians nothing.

In New York, the news media published one damning story after another about what a liar Republican George Santos was and he was elected to the House anyway. He was finally expelled from Congress, but not for lying.

The New Jersey Democratic Robert Menendez lied day and night, through scandal after scandal, and was re-elected to the Senate three times. Again, it wasn't the lying that did him in, it was a stack of felonies.

I blame voters. Where are the choruses of condemnation? Where are the demands for more truthful candidates? Where is the punishment for lying?

It's a bizarre morality that tolerates lying in politics, but nowhere else. It's not how we run our families, our personal relationships, our work lives, or our businesses. No parent ever has caught their kid in a lie, been told by that kid that all kids lie, and then said, "OK, you got me there."

I find the rationalizing especially baffling among the people I know who are faithful and practicing Christians, where the law on lying, and tolerating lying, is pretty clear. The same people who spend their Sundays condemning the sin of moral relativism are also the ones saying, "sure, they lie, but I like their policies."

Just once, I'd like to hear someone say, "I condemn lying in politics" and then end the sentence there.

Part of the reason lying is enjoying its golden age is that it's never been easier. Politicians post lie after lie on their social media pages and their supporters accept that as fact even though more reliable facts are just a few google clicks away.

It's also legal to lie, at least about a public figure like a politician. I talked to one reader who was boiling mad over the lying in the political ads piling up in his mailbox. He sent me one and he was right, it stank to high heaven. But the Constitution protects political lying as free speech. Even so, the Gazette ran a few s fact-checking ads, too.

And, that's the point. At the Gazette, we're going to keep running carefully researched and verifiable fact-checking s. We're in the bull-calling business and that's not going to change just because it's fallen out of favor. We condemn lying. Period.