Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

It may be political journalism's No. 1 challenge over the next six months.

There are many remarkable things about presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. High among them is his complete disregard for the truth.

Of course, politicians bending the truth, stretching the truth, embellishing, making things up, prevaricating and lying is hardly unheard of.

Yet when it comes to a total lack of interest in veracity, and a breezy refusal to back off when confronted with the bogus nature of one of his assertions, Trump is in a league by himself, fact-checking professionals agree.

Clearly it is the duty of journalists to fact-check the pronouncements of all politicians and public officials. They need to be held accountable for what they say and what they do.

But it's not a matter of one and done.

When politicians brazenly repeat untruths and fabrications, they need to be called out each time. It's not enough to refute a statement once. Allowing inaccuracy to go unchallenged helps nonsense to become an accepted part of the political narrative. (It often doesn't need that much help!)

And that happens far too often.

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One of the heartening developments over the past decade has been the advent of aggressive fact-checking of political statements. These efforts go far beyond the tired and unsatisfying he-said, she-said approach that tells voters nothing; they reach conclusions, often harsh ones. Heading the charge are two outfits that fact-check for a living, FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and PolitiFact, an initiative of the Tampa Bay Times, along with Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post. But other news outlets also make forays into the fact-checking business.

Sometimes, confronted with their errors and prevarications, pols will back off. But not always. And Trump not so much. That means the debunking has to be repeated when the whoppers are.

In recent days Kessler and Chava Gourarie, writing in Columbia Journalism Review, have criticized television interviewers for repeatedly allowing Trump to offer up without challenge discredited information. BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski tweeted 12 instances when Trump was allowed to repeat his false claim that he opposed the war in Iraq.

On the flip side, CNN's Jake Tapper did a fine job of, and was widely praised for, decimating Trump's peculiar effort to link Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's father to the Kennedy assassination.

But this is not simply a problem for television. Print, digital and radio journalists share the duty of relentlessly truth-squadding the pols, particularly one as truth-challenged as The Donald.

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So, you ask, is Trump really that bad when it comes to phony statements? Isn't this just business as usual for politicians?

According to the pros, yep, he is that bad.

Here's what FactCheck.org said on December 21, 2015, when it dubbed Trump the "King of Whoppers":

"It’s been a banner year for political whoppers — and for one teller of tall tales in particular: Donald Trump.

"In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.

"He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong."

And this from FactCheck, which eschews the colorful Pinocchios and pants-on-fire labels doled out by its fact-checking colleagues.

In awarding Trump its coveted Lie of the Year award for 2015, PolitiFact couldn't settle on one of Trump's truth-challenged proclamations. The award went for his body of work. "Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy he has followed for years," PolitiFact said.

It added, "PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial." Remember those mythical Muslims celebrating 9/11 all over North Jersey?

And this is very much a bipartisan award. The 2013 winner was President Obama for "If you liked your health plan, you can keep it."

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The Washington Post's Kessler has an assessment similar to those of his fellow fact-checkers. He wrote: "Trump makes Four-Pinocchio statements over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false. He appears to care little about the facts; his staff does not even bother to respond to fact-checking inquiries."

And Trump's powerful aversion to the truth apparently is not a new phenomenon. In a piece for Politico titled Confessions of a Trump Tabloid Scribe, Susan Mulcahy recalls her adventures writing about the mogul for the New York Post's gossipy Page Six back in the 1980s.

Trump, she says, "wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, 'Good morning,' you could be pretty sure it was 5 o’clock in the afternoon."

Trump, as unconventional a political figure as there is, has proven a challenge for the news media. A master media manipulator, and a person who simply makes news, Trump has dominated the political conversation, not to mention cable TV. His seemingly unlimited amount of free media has no doubt helped fuel his campaign, never mind that much of it has been negative.

So here's a golden opportunity for the media to prove its worth. Vigorously fact-check the Trumpian declarations, and don't be bashful about repeating the findings when the spurious claims resurface.

They will.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder

