there are deeper concerns tonight that the world’s shining light of democracy has gone dark.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman echoed Halperin’s 9/11 metaphor on Friday night on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “This is a moral 9/11! Only 9/11 was done to us from the outside and we did this to ourselves.” Hillary losing was now the moral equivalent of losing 3,000 Americans in a terrorist attack.
That verdict came after Maher’s own angry rant against Trump voters, who he believed had sealed their own doom: “Enjoy your victory, Trump voters. Because when you’re dying because you don’t have health insurance to treat the infection you got for a back alley abortion you had to get because of fetal lead poisoning, you can say to yourself, at least I didn’t vote for someone with a private e-mail server.”
When Democrats win, it’s a victory for hope and change and national unity. When Republicans win, it is a sad day, a victory for dark forces, their vicious lies and flagrant fouls, manipulating the unruly throng. As Peter Jennings infamously said after the 1994 Republican wave election, it was “a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage,” a stomping, screaming temper tantrum, not a serious verdict on the future of America. These voters would need to see the error of their ways and know the damage they had committed.
They saw Trump’s voters just as the Clinton campaign saw them: a basket of deplorables. All season long the pro-Hillary press treated Trump’s followers with utter contempt. This was the country class showing its utter temerity in challenging the ruling class. These were extra-chromosomed rednecks in MAGA hats. As Hillary put it, they were “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
But those deplorables carried the day.
The pundits got it all wrong. They had accepted the comforting prophecies of the national media, not just regarding the coronation of Hillary Clinton, but on America’s repudiation of Donald Trump. It was a resounding rejection of the ruling class—themselves. But these elites were not going silently into the night. The media would only double down, and triple down, and quadruple down as Trump made his way to the White House. All the rules learned at journalism school were tossed aside. If the news was harmful to this man, it was to be magnified; if it was favorable to him, it was to be ignored; and if needed, the “news” was faked.
The ruling class was not about to concede an inch of turf to the peasants.
2
Defining Our Terms
THERE IS NOTHING THAT inflames media elites more than Donald Trump dismissing them as fake news. It’s not a criticism of a specific reporter, or a story, or even an outlet. It’s a blanket condemnation of an entire industry. Worse, he’s pinning this charge on what they believe to be above reproach because journalists are founts of truth, and woe to the man who challenges their integrity. They decide what is truth, and no one else.
Yet fake news exists. It has for a very long time.
In print, we think of Janet Cooke at the Washington Post who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her shocking story of Jimmy the eight-year-old cocaine addict, except she’d made the whole thing up. We think of Jayson Blair at the New York Times in 2003 pretending to report from Iraq War veteran Jessica Lynch’s tiny West Virginia hometown when he was sitting in a bar down the street from Times Square.
On television, we think of NBC rigging GM trucks to explode on cue and ABC producers with hidden cameras trying to put rotten meat on sale at Food Lion. We think of Dan Rather spreading around phony National Guard memos to destroy George W. Bush’s presidential campaign or Brian Williams claiming he was on a helicopter that took rocket fire during the Iraq War or making up scenes of floating bodies in the hurricane-flooded streets of New Orleans.
The flagrant fakery usually is cooked up in the service of a liberal goal because the ends justify the means. One could guess that some stories are “too good to check” when a liberal argument can be made. Or one could be more cynical and suggest that since most political news is created with the liberal agenda in mind, it’s not surprising that some or all of that liberal product allows fraudulent claims as long as it propels the narrative. For Trump, the goal is to build a case for his removal from office.
Trump’s critics will point out that he has a history of pushing his own fake news. He can be reckless with conspiracy theories. He toyed for years with the unproven charge that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. (As opposed to Obama’s fairy tale that his father hung around with him in Hawaii until he was two, when actually his mother took him back to the mainland within a month of his birth.) During the primary campaign, Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer used grainy old black-and-white photos to suggest that Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald” before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Trump made no effort to denounce the slander. He also bragged about a level of wealth that no serious analyst believes. His willingness to play loose with false information—or create it himself—adds a layer of outrage within the sanctimonious press.
National media leaders insist that they should be honored and respected as the arbiters of fact. Many stories on television and in print contain facts, but they also carry a lot of opinions that masquerade as facts, such as the “fact” that the Clintons are innocent every time they’re caught in a lie—or criminal act. Facts can be spun. Or be nonexistent. Or be counterfeit.
It’s a matter of degree. There is biased news, false news, and fake news.
Biased news appears when the facts or the sources of a story are arranged to deliver a particular perspective that is in keeping with the opinions of the author. It is an everyday phenomenon in the press—everywhere. In fact, one can argue that all news is biased. It starts with the decision to label something as news. Look at the front pages of the Washington Post and the Washington Times on any given day and you’ll find a wide discrepancy in story selection. Each paper can defend its choice of “front-page” stories. But that judgment was predicated on subjective opinions, and that is bias.
That same bias is found in numerous other ways inside a story. The headline. The people interviewed and the length given to them. The tone of the questions. The edited responses. The conclusion reached. Bias, bias, bias.
A good reporter understands this. A good reporter seeks truth and commits to putting aside his or her prejudices—no easy task—in the process.
When President George H. W. Bush died and President Trump attended a memorial service at the National Cathedral with the former presidents, the Washington Post put Trump’s discomfort on the front page under the headline “Despite Sitting with Predecessors, Trump Stands Alone at Funeral.” Reporter Philip Rucker placed Trump in a mortifying spot: “First was the president Trump said was illegitimate (Barack Obama); then the first lady he called a profligate spender of taxpayer dollars (Michelle Obama); then the president he called the worst abuser of women (Bill Clinton); then the first lady and secretary of state he said should be in jail (Hillary Clinton); and then the president he said was the second-worst behind Obama (Jimmy Carter) and his wife, Rosalynn.” Rucker had no space to counter this with the choice epithets Obama or the Clintons or the Carters lobbed at Trump.
On the same day, the Washington Times put Trump’s attendance on page A-9 under the headline “With Trump on Fringes, Presidents Club Assembles to Attend Bush Funeral.” It was an Associated Press dispatch that noted that both sides were hostile, not just one: “But the staid group of Oval Office occupants has been disturbed since Donald Trump’s election. And since his swearing-in, Mr. Trump has spurned most contact with his predecessors—and they have snubbed him in return.”
False news is when media outlets
