So, after one exhausting week of the new Trump presidency, this is the problem:

In this dangerous 21st century, fraught with high drama and peril, how does the world at large, the American people in particular and the news media in general deal with a U.S. president, ostensibly the “leader of the free world,” who is proving himself, in virtually every major utterance, to be a certifiable liar.

We have never confronted this issue before. It is so unprecedented it may very well lead to a crisis that ultimately torpedoes this presidency.

American leaders have often been wildly controversial, of course, and political debate is now more polarized than ever. But for decades, if not centuries, much of the world has more often than not believed the basic information — “the set of facts” — that a U.S. president has provided in the name of his government. That, it appears, may be in the past.

I want to zero in on the news media’s response to this.

In his first speech last Saturday after the inauguration, President Trump said he was at “war with the media” and regarded reporters as “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”

Incredibly, he then went on to tell the CIA employees in his audience that reports he was critical of U.S. intelligence agencies were simply a media fabrication. This claim was dismissed as totally false in most media reports about the speech.

On Monday, Trump met with Congressional leaders and made a completely bogus charge that “millions of people” had voted illegally in the last election. This produced a stunning headline on the front page of The New York Times: “Meeting With Top Leaders, Trump Repeats an Election Lie.”

What was unique about the headline was the use of the word “lie.” That same word was used in other media accounts of Trump’s remarks, and signalled — finally — a toughening response by the media to Trump’s unrelenting assault on the press.

Until this past week and throughout the election campaign of the past year, journalists have danced around how to describe Trump’s frequent falsehoods. This has included Trump’s lies over the years about Barack Obama’s citizenship and his false account of seeing Muslims dancing with joy in New Jersey after the horrific attacks on 9/11 in 2001.

But the flurry of lies this past week, now by President Trump, seems to have crossed the line for many journalists and news organizations. Trump’s insistence — contrary to reality — that he attracted a larger audience to his inauguration than Obama struck most people as vain and irrelevant. But it was a matter of immense importance to the new president.

When Trump’s press secretary was placed in the embarrassing position of defending this, it prompted one of his colleagues — a senior White House aide — to argue absurdly that they were basing their view on “alternative facts” than those accepted by everyone else.

However, it was Trump’s comment about voter fraud that enraged many journalists, and politicians. Not only was the charge false — with no evidence ever being presented to justify it — it served to question the integrity of the entire American political system.

If left to stand, the charge also served to justify efforts by Republicans in recent years to suppress the vote in those locations, such as America’s inner cities, which traditionally vote Democratic.

The danger is not only that the charge may be left to linger, but it also has the endorsement of the American presidency, which has the potential of giving it credence.

As for Trump’s assault on the press, U.S. journalists know that this not the time to be complacent. As ludicrous as Trump’s attacks have been, there is clearly a strategy at work to undermine the power of the press. With Trump and Republicans in control of so many levels of government, American journalism, however flawed, stands potentially as Trump’s greatest adversary.

But this “war,” as new president describes it, comes at a time of considerable weakness for America’s news media. Public trust in journalism is almost as low as its distrust of politicians. American laws to protect the fabled “freedom of the press” have been weakened in recent years. And most major news organizations are in trouble financially.

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Past history suggests that this may be a time when news organizations will find themselves vulnerable to persistent White House pressures.

Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News.

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