On Thursday, the New York Times’s opinion section lay that false equivalency to rest, with this graph:

The title of the New York Times piece reads, “Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s.” And this idea alighted on the newspaper: “After we published a list of President Trump’s lies this summer, we heard a common response from his supporters. They said, in effect: Yes, but if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad.”

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Journalists have struggled with the matter of Trump’s lies because of the attendant evidentiary challenges: A state of mind — the intent to deceive — must be established before attaching the “L” word to a statement. As a result, some news organizations have been hesitant to fling the word around too much. “I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you,” said former NPR news boss Michael Oreskes back in January.

To address the matter, the Times placed on that chart only “demonstrably and substantially false statements.” That standard hews close to the one that BuzzFeed adopted for Trump-lie purposes: a statement that “contradicts clear and widely published information that we have reason to think [Trump has] seen.”

Whatever standard is chosen, Trump looks awful. “He makes misleading statements and mild exaggerations – about economic statistics, his political opponents and many other subjects – far more often than Obama,” the Times notes under the bylines of David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson. Here, The Post’s Fact Checker puts some numbers behind the notion. One month ago, the Fact Checker team’s Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly and Nicole Lewis counted 1,628 false or misleading claims over 298 days.

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