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Donald Trump routinely lies, and the media lets him — why?
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As communications professor Michelle Amazeen told The Daily Beast:

“The incentive for candidates [to lie] is that most media outlets don’t have the resources to check for accuracy immediately,” Amazeen said. “But since the U.S. news media is based on the commercial model—and more eyeballs on the page or the screen is good for business—the networks love it when someone like Donald Trump says outrageous stuff. Fact-checking rains on the parade of that revenue model.”

Another factor is the traditional media approach of emphasizing objectivity and artificial balance in news coverage—what James Carey at Columbia University calls “false equivalency” and New York University professor Jay Rosen refers to as “the View from Nowhere.” As media researcher Nikki Usher put it in a recent Medium post:

Trump has "perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool," said Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University who studies theories of knowledge. "He makes a clearly false or even absurdly false claim, which draws the attention of the media. He then rides that wave until it comes time to call up another one."

PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.