They will never get a seat on the campaign bus, be invited to a posh resort for an interview or get picked to ask a question at a press conference.
You are likely to starve if you bite the hand that feeds you. The press tends to do most of its lying by omission, simply not reporting the lies of "popular" politicians, who never flip-flop, or break their campaign promises they simply evolve to view an issue differently or are forced, by circumstances beyond their control, to establish different priorities.
That is probably one reasons why reporters do not report it. The other reason may be because politicians may not be able to help themselves from lying.
It turns out that one form of lying called false descriptions involves so much of cognitive resources that in fact it is remembered better. Since they are on the media and should address the people they had better engage on using memories that enforce consistency in their statements.
For this they may have to lie in the form of false descriptions in order to know why they said a particular lie when they did, and how different the upcoming lie is from that, and how could it all fall in one place so as to appear true worthy/believable. Thus they may achieve consistence even if the content (since it is about false description/creating events) is a lie.
Strangely, denying a true event that it occurred takes less cognitive effort! So much so that during confusion one may forget that they denied an event before since they put little effort in denying it (i.e., Just said "No!" compared to the cognitive effort mentioned above).
Lastly, should one deny a false event that it ever occurred, should one deny it long enough, they (due to familarization and imagining the event [more cognitive effort]) may tend to believe it in the end! They put themselves in the scene, they imagine (again see descriptive lies above). Since denying that something happened is a weak cognitive process (as mentioned in denial above), but imagining is a stronger cognitive process (see descriptive lies above), then by asking whether a false event occurred after a while causes some to believe that the unreal event occurred!
The weak safety pin of denying an event looses, the stronger imagination lies wins through familiarity, and you have a person believing an unreal event!
Amazing study this one. See details below.
References:
Vieira, K. M., & Lane, S. M. (2013). How you lie affects what you remember.
Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.jarmac.2013.05.005; Retrieved from:
Intricacies of lying: False descriptions easier to remember than false denials .