He lies? You don't say ...

It’s (almost) official: The president of the United States is a liar.

This will not come as a revelation to people who have closely followed President Trump’s public statements and Twitter feed and have long doubted his veracity. It is, instead, a late-dawning recognition by mainstream news organizations, which until fairly recently shied away from branding the president’s many questionable utterances as outright lies.

Nowadays, many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly.

A recent sampling:

● CNN: “The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and falsehoods.”

● Minneapolis Star Tribune: “President Trump lies to troops about pay raise.”

● Financial Times: “The real reason Donald Trump lies.”

● Los Angeles Times: “Mueller report exposes all the president’s liars.”

● Chicago Tribune: “Why are Trump’s lies not ruinous to him? Because truth can be in the eye of the beholder.”

● The New Yorker: “It’s True: Trump Is Lying More, and He’s Doing It on Purpose.”

● Foreign Policy: “Does It Matter That Trump Is a Liar?”

As recently as last summer, a debate still raged within newsrooms: Could a presidential statement, no matter how blatantly false, be deemed a “lie” since, by definition, the word implies awareness of falsity and intent to deceive? How can journalists know what’s in Trump’s mind, even when he repeatedly says transparently untrue things, such as “the wall is under construction right now” on the southern border with Mexico, or that the United States pays “a disproportionate share” of the cost of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)?

But the Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has said his newsroom strives to use the word “judiciously” because using it repeatedly “could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides.”