Daily Inspiration Quote by Jane Mayer

Mayer’s sentence is doing two jobs at once: bookkeeping and knife work. On the surface, it’s a procedural update in a familiar media morality play - a public figure has recanted, calling his own earlier narrative “outright lies.” But the real target isn’t the liar. It’s the people who won’t let the lie die.

The syntax is engineered to corner the reader into skepticism. “Now that” frames the recantation as a decisive plot twist, the kind that should force recalibration. “He has disavowed” carries the chill of legal language: not a soft walk-back, a formal renunciation. Then Mayer widens the lens with “stories he told himself,” a phrase that suggests self-mythology, not mere deception - the psychological machinery that makes a con artist believable, even to himself.

The pivot, “it’s hard to know what to make of,” is faux-agnosticism that functions as judgment. She withholds the punchline while implying one: if the principal actor admits fabrication, what intellectual contortions are required to keep treating the original account as gospel? Naming David Brock is the contextual tell. Brock’s early notoriety came from aggressively partisan storytelling that later became contested, revised, and, in places, renounced. Mayer isn’t relitigating every claim; she’s diagnosing a media ecosystem where allegiance beats evidence.

The subtext is about reputational inertia. Corrections don’t travel as far as accusations, and some audiences prefer the first version because it flatters their priors. Mayer’s intent is to mark that refusal as the real scandal: not that someone lied, but that others insist the lie was truer.