• by Dan Perry , Op-Ed Contributor, 2 hours ago

One of the most striking things about the horrible events in Minnesota -- other than the twin ICE killings themselves -- is how casually and brazenly the President of the United States and his top officials are lying about what billions of people can see for themselves.

This is not spin or selective framing, but flat-out insistence that reality is negotiable and that Americans should distrust their own eyes.

And right-wing media is going along.

Together, the Good and Pretti killings reveal something deeper than dishonesty. They show a governing reflex to simply lie. Evidence that contradicts the lie is discredited or ignored and witnesses are “agitators.”

That is something I have seen all over the autocratic world as a foreign correspondent. It's also something we have all seen from Trump before.

In the past, lying all the time carried a price. But that was when we had a responsible media that could be counted on to fairly make the call.

Indeed, for much of the past century in which mass media emerged -- first with newspapers and then with broadcast radio and TV -- professional news media were perhaps imperfect, but basically dependable to a sufficient degree.

Since the 1950s and onward, ABC, NBC and CBS were not purely partisan actors -- not a rival power center, but a public good. Although yes, they were also businesses.

Newspapers and broadcasters and individual journalists may have had political leanings, but they shared a professional obligation that stood above ideology: when the government made a factual claim, it had to be tested against evidence. If it was false, it had to be called false.

That was journalism’s core function in covering the government.

The press existed to enforce the boundary between authority and reality. This is what Carl Bernstein called the search for the “best obtainable version of the truth.”

There was the presumption that there was a market for this, because the public did not want to be lied to by any side, and thus fairness was baked into the media’s brand equity. We can debate whether the public changed or the media changed – but this has fallen apart.

Many -- if not most -- politicians lie now and then. But few lie like Trump and his administration.

During the four years of his first term, The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” project estimates Trump lied by stating false or misleading claims 30,573 times while serving as POTUS. 

That's not business as usual anywhere in the democratic world.

That was once how all mainstream news media outlets would have covered it. What has changed NOW is that the right-wing media is actually in on the act. The most charitable view is that they will not often call him out, or make clear to the audience that a narrative is false.

The question stopped being “Is this true?” and became “Who does this help?”

So when Trump insisted his first, less-than-capacity inauguration crowd was the largest in history, right-wing media did not say what aerial photographs made obvious, but reframed the issue as a petty media obsession.

Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was given a friendly platform to introduce the phrase “alternative facts,” and Fox hosts treated it not as an admission of lying but as a clever rebuttal to media arrogance. The question was not framed as whether the claim was true.

The pattern became lethal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right-wing media echoed Trump’s insistence that the virus was “like the flu,” that concern was “hysteria,” and that the danger was exaggerated for political reasons, even as hospitals filled and death counts soared.

The 2020 election hardened this practice. Right-wing media promoted claims of stolen votes, rigged machines, and mass fraud long after courts, election officials, and Trump’s own Justice Department rejected them.

The Dominion lawsuit revealed that Fox executives and hosts knew these claims were false while continuing to air them. Video evidence, court rulings, and sworn testimony all existed – but the captive MAGA audience was trained to distrust them.

And the same dynamic governs everything from January 6 to tariffs. Despite thousands of hours of footage showing Trump supporters storming the Capitol, Fox promoted stories about Antifa and FBI setups.

Despite basic economics, right-wing media does not prominently challenge the claims that tariffs are “paid by China,” when in fact tariffs are taxes paid by American importers and passed on to American consumers.

This is Economics 101 – even if Trump insists that “we’re making a fortune,” describing an imaginary world in which foreign governments write checks to the U.S. Treasury out of submission.

In the hours after the Pretti killing, right-wing media ramped up the use of “agitators” to describe the anti-ICE protesters. While CNN was marveling at how Trump officials were ignoring and contradicting the videos from the scene, I could find no equivalent on right-wing media.

The Fox headline, hours after the situation was quite clear, uncritically cited Trump’s version: “Trump cites armed suspect, lack of police support following fatal Border Patrol shooting in Minneapolis; President claims federal agents 'had to protect themselves' without local police support during fatal Minneapolis shooting.” 

Another headline passed on Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s version: “Bondi blames Minneapolis leaders after suspect DHS officials say was armed is killed by CBP, igniting unrest; AG says suspect 'violently resisted,' describes demonstrations as 'extremely organized.'”

Nothing in either article conceded the absurdity of the claims. Kristi Noem claimed the victim had committed “domestic terrorism.”

A society cannot function this way. You cannot run a modern economy, manage complex alliances, or administer justice if reality itself is treated as partisan.

Evidence cannot be optional in a healthy society. The only question is whether enough Americans — and enough journalists — are willing to say what they plainly show.

We need to appeal to the patriotism of the right-wing media. They need to think about what they are doing to society.

Because once a society agrees to stop believing its own eyes, it has already surrendered something essential.