Reckless Disregard

Remembering the standard.

“She didn’t try to run him over,” Mr. Trump said on the day of the shooting of Renee Good. “She ran him over.” ¹

If something is:

1. Easily verifiable

2. Incendiary if wrong

3. And you say it anyway without checking

...then you’re essentially saying “I don’t care enough about the truth of this claim to spend thirty seconds verifying it, even though I know a false version would cause damage.” That’s a kind of reckless indifference to truth that functions very much like lying in its effects and its ethics.

From the NYT:

“More videos are likely to emerge, but the visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over. The footage provides visibility into the positioning between the agent and Ms. Good’s S.U.V., and the key moments of escalation. It also establishes how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place.”

There’s a concept in defamation law - “reckless disregard for the truth” - that captures this. You don’t have to know something is false to be culpable; you just have to show such disregard for whether it’s true that you don’t bother to check when you obviously should.

The moral weight comes from the combination of those factors. If it’s hard to verify, that’s one thing. If it’s trivial or low-stakes, that’s another. But when you’re making an explosive claim that’s easily checkable and you don’t check? You’ve essentially decided that the satisfactions of saying the thing matter more to you than whether it’s true. That’s functionally choosing falsehood, even if you’re outsourcing the actual lying to your own negligence.

1. Not rendering an instantaneous opinion was an option.