Liars are stupid and foolish, and there is no good end for those who lie, whether journalists or any other human being. Psalm 52:2-5 condemns the deceitful tongue that loves evil more than good and lying more than righteousness, and God will destroy and uproot such a person. Machines such as polygraphs and voice analyzers cannot reliably detect lies, but people can learn to, and the Five Books of Moses show how. The Hebrew word for truth, emet, is made of the first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet, so truth fits into a consistent sequence from A to Z. The word for a lie, sheker, is made of the second-last, fourth-last, and third-last letters, jumbled near the end, so lies are isolated and incoherent. The letters of emet stand on firm, broad bases, while those of sheker balance on points and are unstable. Truth is also single, while lies are many. We ask for "the truth" but "a lie," because there is one truth and countless lies. To detect deceit, check whether a story fits its context, probe it to see whether it wobbles, and watch for departures from a speaker's baseline truth-telling mannerisms. Because so much news and information is unreliable, confidence should be placed only where it is earned, and absolute trust belongs only to the Word of God.

Deceitfulness pervades many facets of society, casting a shadow over truth and integrity. The act of falsely attributing an article to Dr. Walter Williams exemplifies a deliberate lie, using another's reputation to push a personal agenda. This fraud, though simple, reveals a deeper issue of trustworthiness in public discourse. Similarly, in the health food industry, products labeled as raw are often pasteurized, misleading consumers through deceptive marketing. In the economic sphere, a massive fraud known as robo-signing, practiced by major Wall Street banks since the late 1990s, involves falsifying documents and clouding home titles for millions, driven by greed rather than the claimed excuse of saving time. This deceit, facilitated by an unregulated shadow banking system, prioritizes profit over honesty, with government responses appearing to shield the perpetrators rather than punish them. As described in Jeremiah 9:3-6, such pervasive deceit mirrors the state of Judah before its fall, where lies and slander dominated, and truth was forsaken. God warns of this environment of deceit, urging caution and highlighting the refusal to know Him through such practices. This rampant fraud reflects the influence of the prince of the power of the air, a liar and the father of liars, whose ways humanity has tragically adopted.