When Trump was president, Republicans fought to repeal the health insurance program.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — in contradiction of history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, “salvaged Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.
During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the assertion also served to remind voters that Democrats ultimately won the yearslong political fight over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.
🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/
Journalistically, I think “lying” implies willfullness, and a reporter cannot 100% prove that a false statement was made willfully, with knowledge that the statement was false.
What the reporter can do is point out that the statement was false, with evidence that demonstrates that, even including statements to the contrary by the person making the false statement before and after. But you can’t know for sure in the moment a false statement is being made that the person believed it was false as they were making it.
This journalistic concept is part of the reason the couch fucker meme took off. AP (was it AP?) published a story about how “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” and then retracted it. Why? Because while there’s no evidence that JD Vance did have sex with a couch, and there’s plenty of evidence that JD Vance having sex with a couch was just a joke, there isn’t any proof that JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch.
And yet Fox News will run a dozen stories on how Walz “lied” about his time in China.
That was bizarre and I have no idea what it was truly about. Seemed personal. On the other hand, just the other week Vance told some lies and brought terrorism to a community because of it. Which one is more important?
Walz was in China around the time of the Tiananmen Square protests but not at the time of the actual massacre.