From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This just in.

Well, actually, it was last week that the excruciatingly nonpartisan website Politifact

announced its 2017 lie of the year.

This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.

It's what the website calls a pants-on-fire lie, one that rejects heaps of evidence, such as Russia's theft of private data, its targeted placement of deceptive political ads, its armies of online bots and trolls.

The release by WikiLeaks of Democratic National Committee documents snatched by what most experts believe were Russian hackers.

The reluctant admission by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, that yes, Russia did use their platforms

to influence the election. And of course, the confessions of Trump campaign officials

to lying to the FBI about contacts with highly

placed Russians.

Not proof of collusion, but certainly evidence of Russian attempts to meddle.

Politifact singled out this particular lie for the honor because the stakes are so high.

Denial of the truth, it said, makes it all the more difficult

to address the problem. And so Trump says he's fully cooperating with ongoing investigations

while dismissing it all as a hoax. Fantastic. As former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, testified to Congress this past summer.

I've worked for both parties.

It's inconceivable to me that any of President Trump's predecessors

would deny the gravity of such an open attack on our democratic system.

I don't believe any previous American president would argue that your own

hearings in the Senate are a waste of time. But then, no previous president was so obsessed with the media,

or had so much media with which to be obsessed, especially cable TV news, most especially Fox News.

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