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WSJ editor Gerard Baker defends 'lie' comments from 'Meet the Press' appearance

In a editorial published Wednesday, Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker defended his hesitance to characterize untrue statements made by President-elect Donald Trump as "lies," which drew ire from some journalists when he first made the remarks during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

In the editorial, published in the Journal, Baker expanded on the comments he made to “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd and said that calling a subject a liar requires a “very high standard of reporting.”

“Why the reluctance?" he wrote. "For my part, it’s not because I don’t believe that Mr. Trump has said things that are untrue. Nor is it because I believe that when he says things that are untrue we should refrain from pointing it out … “If we are to use the term “lie” in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent. I can see circumstances where we might. I’m reluctant to use the term, not implacably against it.”

Baker, who appeared on the Sunday morning show alongside New York Times editor Dean Baquet to discuss coverage of the president-elect, faced criticism from some journalists after he said that it was “up to the reader to make up their own mind” about whether or not someone has lied.”

Baker, dismissing the criticism, called it “pearl-clutching.”

“Immediately, my remarks were followed by another fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite,” he wrote. “Dan Rather, a former television newsman of some renown, weighed in to call the remarks ‘deeply disturbing,’” Baker wrote. “I will confess to feeling a little burst of pride at being instructed in reporting ethics by Mr. Rather. It feels a little like being lectured on the virtues of abstinence by Keith Richards.”

Rather left CBS News after a report on former President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service was found to be based on false documents. He subsequently sued CBS, with a court ultimately dismissing the case.

Baker said that other news outlets stand to be presumed partisan by making the “moral as well as factual judgment” of whether someone has lied.

“To refrain from labeling leaders’ statements as lies is to support an unrelenting but not omniscient press, one that trusts readers’ judgments rather than presenting judgments to them,” he continued. “If we routinely make these kinds of judgments, readers would start to see our inevitably selective use of a moral censure as partisanship. We must not only be objective. We must be seen to be objective to continue to earn our readers’ trust.”

