If this hasn’t been the worst year ever for truth in politics, I can’t think of what was. Nor can anyone tell me.

The Republican presidential nominee has produced more falsehoods than the major fact-checking sites have identified from a major presidential candidate since they came into existence. The Democratic nominee hasn’t come anywhere close to that. But she’s not exactly dwelling in Honest Abe territory, either.

It’s almost at the point where “truthiness” — Stephen Colbert’s old word for the from-the-gut canards that helped to lead to the Iraq war — would be preferable to what we have now: unsubstantiated nonsense and outright lies. In too many cases, they have taken hold as the basis for people’s voting decisions.

Traditional journalism has struggled to keep up with it all. It has been overwhelmed by the legion of assertions that scream out for fact-checking; undercut, at times, by journalists’ human failings and the economic imperatives of ratings and page views; and under siege from partisan attacks intended to bully it out of doing its job.