correction? Not on your life.
After the Benghazi consulate attack in 2012, the Obama administration shamelessly tried to argue that the killing of four Americans was not a terrorist attack but a protest of an Islamophobic video on YouTube. The networks ran this argument for days . . . until the facts overwhelmed the White House talking points. The networks made a mistake and eventually corrected it. But then when Brian Williams had a chance to press President Obama on this false claim, he merely asked, “Have you been happy with the intelligence?” What mattered was whether Obama was pleased, not whether he mangled the facts.
Fake news is the inexcusable and the essence of journalistic dishonesty. The journalist knows that what he or she is presenting is either false or designed to advance an agenda. In 2004, Dan Rather had his producer Mary Mapes deliberately gather testimony from a Bush-hating malcontent pushing forged documents, ignoring document authenticators while deliberately refusing to interview firsthand witnesses from the Texas Air National Guard who would say the opposite because they wanted to sink Bush’s reelection with the fake Air National Guard story. To this day, Rather insists that the “truth” was on their side and “We have to somehow get back to integrity in the news.” The carelessness of the reporting underlined the malignant intentions.
Whether a news item is false or fake is only a matter of intentions. Neither is reliable information and as a result undermines confidence in the media outlet offering the reporting. When people suspect an ideological motivation behind a “news” report, they lose trust in the authenticity of what they see and hear from those “nonpartisan” journalists.
With Trump the ideological opposition was (and still is) so militant in its “reporting” that when he labeled it all fake news, his supporters were ready to accept that.
Some suggest that he might use a less combative synonym for “fake.” Maybe “artificial” or “contrived.” But why? When a reporter invents facts, she should be shamed publicly. Individually or collectively, when news outlets set the agenda for public discussion and tell us what we all should be talking about and how we should view that issue and it’s all predicated on a lie, they deserve to be punished severely in the court of public opinion. When reporters continue to promote the line that Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, had raised his hands and said to a policeman, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” knowing a thorough investigation found that he’d done no such thing, they deserved to be publicly humiliated.
Fake news is also thematic. “News” often is based on slippery underlying assumptions. The Ferguson falsehood projected a belief that white Southerners are naturally racist, and so too are opponents of immigration, and the same should be said about cops. However, the media’s same assumptions about minorities—in their case, their victimhood—cause them deliberately to suppress news that might make people assume that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists or avoid reporting on black-on-black violence in big cities. That narrative isn’t “helpful.”
The term “fake news” resonates with Trump voters because people are frustrated with arrogant media elites dictating to them what is and isn’t an acceptable belief system. For eight years of the Clintons and eight years of the Obamas, they saw these self-righteous watchdogs deliberately seek to avoid every Democratic scandal. Each example was “not news.” But when there’s just a whiff of wrongdoing on the other side—hold the presses! The Republican is always found guilty until he can prove his innocence, and even that won’t be enough.
Since they first developed a taste for their own power in opposing the Vietnam War and forcing Richard Nixon to resign in the Watergate scandal, our national news corporations have become increasingly bold in picking winners and losers, explicitly telling voters who they must elect and what “landmark” legislation they must support. When the people fail in their election choices, they are compared to toddlers throwing tantrums. To repeat Peter Jennings’ 1994 quote in its entirety, “Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week.”
The media then try to run the country between the elections, to enlighten obstreperous citizens, the “poor, uneducated, and easy-to-command” types. If they fail in stopping a man’s cause, they cock the trigger and then fire the final bullet: character assassination. The goal is for your values to become as radioactive in the court of public opinion as the man or cause you supported.
As the media became more aggressive in their pursuit of a liberal agenda, with equal passion conservatives who saw through this plastic propaganda rushed to embrace alternative forms of media as they emerged. First it was Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. The left’s hostility to these uppity conservatives has never waned. Then Fox News emerged on television and overnight became the number one cable news network, so Fox News became Fake News. Leftists wore T-shirts with the Fox News logo and “Faux News” painted on them, along with the slogan “We Distort, You Comply.” They also sold shirts that read “I don’t watch Fox News for the same reason I don’t eat out of the toilet.” They wanted people to cast a strange look at their relatives at the Thanksgiving table when they offered “news” that hadn’t been mentioned on ABC, CBS, NBC, or CNN. News wasn’t “reality” until the preposterously titled “mainstream media” gave it their stamp of approval.
For conservatives there is neither fairness nor balance, nor do the elites believe there should be. These journalists sit on the far left of the ideological spectrum, but they declare themselves centrists, and so virtually all things conservative are “far right.” They even delude themselves into thinking the left—they—are always right and the “Right Is Wrong,” as Arianna Huffington titled one of her silly books. The Huffington Post types dismiss conservatives as a “lunatic fringe” that threatens to “hijack” America.
Conservatives are neither to speak nor to be heard.
People hear the echoes of fake news when after a mass shooting the networks load up their guest lists for a “national conversation” in which there are nineteen voices demanding gun control for every defender of the Second Amendment. Or when the “LGBT” perspective is championed as news while anyone opposing it is a “born-again bigot” who doesn’t deserve the time of day for his troglodyte “hate speech” rebuttal. Or when questioning the impending doom of “climate change”—or even questioning the cost of government efforts to “save us” from their hellish predictions—is treated like a “Flat Earth Society” viewpoint unworthy of public consideration.
The news product on television today is riddled with salesmanship. It is no longer journalism. These are campaign ads. In Democratic administrations, the advertisements are emphatically positive, like the arrival of a miracle stain remover or a wondrous kitchen gadget—it slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries! But when the Republicans win, reporters sound like negative campaign commercials in heavy rotation. Mesothelioma kills you. Call this number to speak to our law firm. You could detect their emotional undertone: These uneducated people and their dangerously simplistic patriotism and outdated moral values can’t possibly represent a “mainstream” or a majority! In their Michael Moore mind meld, the liberal “majority” is being unjustly subjected to the elected “fringe” running the government. The inmates are in charge.
Under Trump, the news can feel like a never-ending tornado warning. It’s designed to keep everyone perpetually uneasy. It sounds that the only way to get rid of the horror-movie echoes of the news is to get rid of the president.
These days we don’t turn on the television and find a nightly “newscast.” Instead, we are force-fed a nightly narrative. In the Trump era, that narrative insists that Trump is not just a bad president. He’s so terrible that he needs to be removed from office immediately. Somehow, the most democratic outcome is for democracy to be overturned.
People think of that constant, lurid, aggravated noise when the president
