This is a strawman argument. You don't have to define truth absolutely to ban news from spouting outright lies. The US seems to have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to be frank, the US should probably be more wary of that.
It's not a strawman for multiple reasons. For one, you have suggested that pointing out outright lies does not suffer from many of the same issues as asserting truth.
"American jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants from Mexico."
Is this a lie? No. But is this disingenuous and misrepresenting much more significant contributors to job loss? Yes. Is it a lie then?
"Transgender women are women."
Is this a lie? Depends entirely on definitions and presuppositions.
Secondly, I think the more important takeaway is that the vast majority of the issues we're having in regards to political discourse have absolutely nothing to do with us not agreeing on facts. Neither side for most of the hard issues are relying on outright incorrect facts.
So not only do I not think that identifying outright lies is as simple and free from bias as you suggest it to be, I also think that the cases in which this could be universally agreed upon would contribute very little to the majority of serious political discussions happening today.
You don't have to capture every biased statement and bending of the truth to counter outright lies like "Obama was born in kenya" or "Trump was endorsed by the pope"
Both of which are believed by huge amounts of Americans.
> You don't have to capture every biased statement and bending of the truth to counter outright lies like "Obama was born in kenya" or "Trump was endorsed by the pope"
You do if you want to make some kind of law about it. You are correct, there are plenty of instances where a story is blatantly false and could be taken care of by some kind of preventative action. But the distribution of possible lies is extremely long tailed. For every one of these instances, there are dozens where it is not entirely a lie, but not entirely the truth, or is biased, or a half-truth, or editorialized, or an extreme conclusion, etc. Libel and slander laws already exist, but are rarely invoked because of this reason. It is nigh impossible to create any kind of system or legislation that does more than what these laws already do, while also properly dealing with all of these edge cases.
I mean, even your examples could easily get around any kind of preventative measures by couching their language. Instead of "Obama was born in Kenya", it could be phrased "rumors have begun to circulate that Obama was in fact born in Kenya". The desired effect of planting this lie in people's minds is still successful, but with a few words there is now no way to create a framework that legally prevents people from spreading lies that way, that is also consistent and not overbearing.
