The right wing media has trafficked in lies for so long because they believe it suits their agenda. They know that if they tell the truth about the President’s actual agenda, most conservative viewers wouldn’t give a fuck. For instance, the Affordable Care Act will likely be imperceptible to people who already have employer-provided insurance, so the strategy to get them on board with fighting it is to tell them the government is taking their insurance away. Stripping the wealthiest of their tax cuts is something only said wealthiest actually care about, so right wing media runs a bunch of stories implying that people of color and single women are given a $50,000 a year salary for sitting on their butts or something. And so on. But what these lies have in common is that average people can’t really grasp the truth without a mediator. The reason I know that single mothers don’t actually get fat checks for not working is because reliable news media tells me that (as do government agencies you can look up online).

But the election is a different story. There’s no way for them to bullshit their way out of what was obvious, which is that Obama continues to be popular with the public and he was re-elected without any real doubt what the outcome would be. The right wing media stopped lying about stuff that’s hard to verify, and started lying about stuff that’s impossible to ignore. Alyssa has a point: Once you start down this road, maybe it is inevitable that you cross that line.