Fabulist.
It’s such a pretty little word, isn’t it? It’s even prettier when you say it out loud. Try it: Fab-u-list. So nice. So sweet. Goodness, it’s only one syllable away from “fabulous”. The word hardly seems at all unkind.
The word has a hint of child-like innocence about it, too. Perhaps that’s because a common definition describes a “fabulist” as a “person who composes or relates fables”.
The ancient Greek author, Aesop, heads the pantheon of fable writers. The German Brothers Grimm and the celebrated Honduran short-story teller Augusto Monterroso are among a litany of literary icons of this fantastical genre.
Like most people who possess even a scintilla of decency and an understanding of the distinction between fact and falsehood, I have never associated the whimsical word “fabulist” with Alex Jones — a marauding mountebank who has leveraged his malevolent mouth into money and fame.
Instead, the other simple and blunt meaning of the word comes to my mind instantly when I suffer the nauseating affront of reading or hearing his foul name: “Liar”.
On Wednesday, a jury ordered Jones to pay nearly $1bn in damages to families of victims of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, which he lied about, dismissing it as a hoax.
Fact: Jones lies like a human spigot. His lies are not only sinister, they betray the figments of a mind untethered from fact and empathy.
He lied when, within hours of the shooting, he said the massacre at Sandy Hook was “staged.” He lied when he said the killing of 20 children between six and seven years old, and six teachers and staff, “was as phoney as a $3 bill” and “stinks to high heaven”. He lied when he said the carnage “looked like a drill”. He lied when he said on his Infowars program that the parents of all the dead children were “crisis actors”.
In this grotesque context, I was astonished to read that the New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post — the stubborn bastions of editorial gentility — opted to call Jones a “fabulist” in recent weeks.
How considerate.
Here is how a September 13, 2022, NYT dispatch described the testimony of several of the dead Sandy Hook children’s families before a jury considering the damages Jones owed them for the harm his torrent of debased lies had caused.
“In wrenching testimony Tuesday, the families of eight Sandy Hook victims began telling a jury about years of torment and threats they had endured after the Infowars fabulist Alex Jones claimed the school massacre was a government hoax in which they were ‘actors,’” the NYT wrote. Jones was also identified as a “fabulist” in the subheading attached to the story.
No, a “fabulist” was not responsible for the “torment” and “threats” endured by the families of murdered elementary schoolchildren. Nor was a “fabulist” responsible for insisting the parents of those murdered elementary schoolchildren were “actors”.
A serial, gloating liar was.
To her credit, the NYT reporter referred to Jones’ Sandy Hook “lies” four times in the body of her story.
This, however, raises some perplexing questions. If the evidence is clear and convincing that Jones repeatedly lied, why not label him a “liar”?
Is the word too harsh, too frank, too judgemental to be employed — despite being accurate?
The NYT, in the same piece, reached — predictably — for the always-reliable euphemisms, “bogus claims” and “theory”, proving that camouflaging the truth behind polite-sounding language remains in vogue at the newspaper.
A more egregious example of this infuriating tendency — even in the most blatant cases — not to employ “liar” when it demands to be used, came courtesy of a Washington Post opinion and editorial writer.
Incredibly, not once in a more than 800-word column celebrating, in part, Jones’ courtroom comeuppance did the columnist write “liar”. Instead, she described Jones as an “infamous fabulist” prone to “falsehood[s]” and “accusation[s] of fakery” who has made a “career out of deception — hawking hoaxes”.
Again, why all the unnecessary embroidery when one succinct word — liar — will do?
My complaint is not a quibble revolving simply around word choice.
It reflects the refusal or, more charitably, grating hesitancy of too many establishment editors and reporters to follow George Orwell’s first and most important rule on writing: Never use a long word where a short [and honest] one will do.
This is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the engrained practice of America’s “elite” media of shading, qualifying or publishing the lies of powerful, particularly political, liars is familiar and dishonourable.
But the election in 2016 of Alex Jones’ fawning favourite, Donald Trump, as president, forced these top-of-the-masthead editors to reckon with livid readers, listeners and viewers demanding an end to the old, agreeable ententes between the liars and the so-called “truth-tellers”.
Trump is addicted to lying. Yet, initially at least, publications like the NYT and the Post appear to have decided that it would be unbecoming, if not discourteous, to declare on their news pages that the commander-in-chief was a liar who lied with, well, Alex Jones-like facility and cruelty.
Pressed by subscribers, former NYT Editor Dean Baquet acknowledged that Trump had lied. “On a couple of occasions, we have used ‘lie’ to describe something President Trump said.”
Hip. Hip. Hooray.
And yet, spent, anachronistic habits are hard to break.
“I don’t think we should use that word every day in The New York Times,” Baquet explained. Since “using ‘lie’ repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role”.
I gather the same deference and aversion to “taking political sides” extends, these days, in weighty newsrooms in New York and Washington, DC, to Alex Jones.
This must stop. It won’t. Even yesterday, the Post and the NYT did not include “liar” in news stories detailing the extraordinary damages awarded by the jury. For the Post, Jones remains “a reckless purveyor of conspiracy theories”. While the NYT clung, of course, to “fabulist”.
It is shameful. The families who confronted Jones and prevailed know the vile measure of this “fabulist”: he is, and will always be, a liar.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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