Dean Baquet, our executive editor, has addressed this issue publicly several times. Here are some of his thoughts.

Most politicians obfuscate or exaggerate at times. But I wouldn’t use the word “lie” in a news story in cases like that. I don’t think we should use that word every day in The New York Times.

The word “lie” is very powerful. For one thing, it assumes that someone knew the statement was false. Another reason to use the word judiciously is that our readers could end up focusing more on our use of the word than on what was said. And using “lie” repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role.

Of course, even when we don’t say “lie,” we try to make it very clear to readers if a politician says something false, and to present the evidence showing that the statement isn’t true.

But on a couple of occasions, we have used “lie” to describe something President Trump said. The most prominent example was when Trump, as a candidate, finally acknowledged that President Obama had been born in the United States. For years, he had pushed the false idea that Obama wasn’t born here. It was clearly untrue, but Trump said it over and over.