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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 make a mistake. Sadly, this is where the arrogance of the press rears its ugly head. Like Fonzie from the old TV show Happy Days, they seem clinically unable to declare they were wr-wr-wr-wrong. And a 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 decries “fake news.” And it resonates like no other issue in politics today.

The False or Fake News about Trump

Even by our more generous definition, the media have put out a massive pile of some seriously false news about Trump that they’ve been forced to correct. The public humiliation infuriates them, especially when they’ve had to demote or fire employees. Around the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, someone in the Trump administration had a brilliant idea. The president proclaimed that he would cobble together a list of the worst fake news stories of 2017. The media went bonkers. The New York Times warned that the hubbub over a list “alarmed advocates of press freedom and heartened his political base.” There you had it. On one side, the forces of freedom; on the other, supporters of Donald Trump.

The Media Research Center’s blog site, NewsBusters, released its own list: the “Eight Times the Liberal Media Screwed Up on Trump-Russia in 2017.” So many were fixated on Russia, putting the cart in front of the horse in trying to prove that Trump’s election was imposed by Moscow. What about Hillary’s connection to Russia (see the Uranium One deal)?

Here are the examples found in the report.

• CNN filed an explosive online report that claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the head of a massive Russian investment fund who met with Trump pal Anthony Scaramucci before Inauguration Day. The CNN story speculated that the two might have discussed the new administration lifting Russian sanctions—a tidbit that, if true, would have potentially big financial benefits to the investment fund.

The story cited only a single anonymous source, which showed how flimsy it was. And then it fell apart completely. By the next day, visitors to CNN’s web page found a giant “Editor’s Note” explaining that the story “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. . . . CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.” The problem is that this story most certainly did meet their standards.

The three “investigative reporters” at CNN were fired.

• ABC’s chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, made the jaw-dropping claim that Trump’s first (and quickly fired) national security advisor, Michael Flynn, would testify that during the 2016 campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump had “ordered him—directed him to make contact with the Russians, which contradicts all that Donald Trump has said to this point.”

If true, that conceivably would have put the president in legal jeopardy. Within minutes, Ross’s report was being parroted across the national media, and the stock market fell more than 300 points. But it turned out that Ross had committed the biggest blunder of his career. Ross clarified hours later that Trump made the alleged request of Flynn not as a candidate but after he was elected—which made it a routine act of a transition team, not collusion.

ABC put out a statement: “We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.” ABC suspended Ross for a month without pay and barred him from covering President Trump in the future. He later left ABC in disgrace.

• Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey (speaking of disgraces) was widely hyped as the opening scene of a new Watergate or worse. Previewing a congressional hearing that would star Comey, both ABC and CNN claimed that Comey would specifically dispute Trump’s statement that he told the President “on three separate occasions, that I’m not under investigation.”

If this was true, Trump would have been lying about being a target of the investigation. Two days later, Comey said exactly the opposite, confirming that he had assured the President that he was not under investigation. Both CNN and ABC updated their web stories, but ABC never told viewers on television—that’s where viewers had been misled—that its reporting was 100 percent fake news.

• A “bombshell” New York Times story had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election” and particularly around the time of the e-mail hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

If true, this wasn’t contact just with Russians but with Russian spies. But as usual the Times had next to nothing but fog. Get a load of this sentence: “The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”

In his Senate hearings, Senator Jim Risch (R–Idaho) asked Comey directly about the Times story and whether it was “a fair statement” to declare it was “not true.” Comey responded, “In the main, it was not true.” He added emphasis: “The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing on classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it. And we don’t call the press and say, ‘Hey, you got that thing wrong.’”

Leakers may not be experts. Imagine that!

Yet the New York Times refused to withdraw its claim, noting in its write-up only that “Mr. Comey did not say exactly what he believed was incorrect about the article” and that the paper’s anonymous sources still stood by their claims. “The original sources could not immediately be reached after Mr. Comey’s remarks, but in the months since the article was published, they have indicated that they believed the account was solid.”

This from the newspaper whose commercials during the 2017 Oscars insisted “The truth is more important than ever.”

• CNN published an early-morning story claiming that Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and other Trump employees received an e-mail containing a “decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents” on September 4, 2016, nine days before they were publicly revealed on September 13.

If true, that would demonstrate a secret collusion between the campaign and WikiLeaks. Ooooops. Actually, the e-mail was dated ten days later, September 14, after the information was made available publicly.

But this was exposed only after CNN spent most of a day proudly touting a “BREAKING NEWS” banner and “CNN Exclusive” that claimed, “Emails Reveal Effort to Give Trump Campaign Wikileaks Documents.” CNN had to announce an on-air correction but insisted that the cooks of this half-baked story had “followed the editorial standards process.” Some process.

• Bloomberg News claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “issued a subpoena” to Deutsche Bank that “zeroed in” on President Trump personally. Their explosive headline: “Mueller Subpoenas Trump’s Deutsche Bank Records, Source Says.” After a cable-news frenzy over the mere thought of Mueller reaching into Trump’s personal finances, Bloomberg had to backpedal, as the request was apparently not for the President’s personal records but more vaguely for “documents and data related to people or entities affiliated with Trump.”

• NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander sent the media into a frenzy when he tweeted “BREAKING” news that the U.S. Treasury Department had announced it would, in his words, “allow some companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, aka fmr [sic] KGB.” Alexander then phoned in to MSNBC, where the screaming headline claimed that the new administration was “easing U.S. sanctions on Russia.”

Except that the sanctions weren’t being eased. It was only a “technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid any unintended consequences of cybersanctions,” as an embarrassed Alexander noted in a follow-up tweet later in the day.

• Several media outlets made the outrageous claim that the “evidence” for Russian meddling in the election was the unanimous verdict of U.S. intelligence. “All 17 intelligence agencies have agreed Russia was behind the hack of Democratic email systems and tried to influence the 2016 election to benefit Trump,” claimed one Associated Press report. That “17 intelligence agencies” line was repeated ad nauseam.

The AP and the New York Times eventually were forced to backpedal on those exaggerated claims, admitting that only three agencies (FBI, CIA, and NSA) had reviewed the intelligence, which was then issued by a fourth, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. AP issued a correction that it had spread a false number in four separate articles: “Not all 17 intelligence agencies were involved in reaching the assessment.” Interesting math, that. Less than one-quarter equals “not all.”

Trump eventually left it to the Republican National Committee to post his list of the most flagrant fiascoes. They had plenty more to add to the bonfire of fake news:

• Time reporter Zeke Miller falsely tweeted that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. It turns out Miller’s view had been obscured by a door and a Secret Service agent. Nor did he ever bother to confirm the alleged absence of the MLK bust with anyone in the Trump administration. It was apparently “too good to check.” Miller quickly apologized and said it shouldn’t reflect on the magazine. Which of course it should.

• Washington Post political scribe Dave Weigel tweeted out a picture of an empty theater, mocking a rally in Pensacola as “packed to the rafters,” but the picture was taken hours before the crowd arrived. He deleted it and apologized and said it shouldn’t reflect on his newspaper. Which of course it did.

• Newsweek wrongly reported that Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda did not shake President Trump’s hand in Warsaw despite videotaped evidence to the contrary. They opted for this all-caps blaring headline: “WATCH DONALD TRUMP HANDSHAKE REJECTED BY POLISH FIRST LADY IN HILARIOUSLY AWKWARD EXCHANGE.” The story began, “On Thursday, the world was once again blessed with an unusual, albeit hilarious, apparent slight, this time involving Trump and the first lady of Poland.” There was no snub. The Polish first lady had passed by the president to shake hands with the American first lady—and then came right back to Trump.

• CNN deceptively edited a video to make it appear that President Trump bumbled into overfeeding fish during a visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “Trump Feeds Fish, Winds Up Pouring the Entire Box of Food into a Koi Pond,” one CNN headline read, as if he had dumped it out of cultural ignorance. In the original video put out by CNN’s Twitter account, the camera zoomed in tight on the President while he threw food to the fish with a spoon before he dumped his whole box into the water. What wasn’t in CNN’s video? The Japanese leader dumping his box of fish food first, before Trump followed.

Some of these “scoops” were tiny thimbles on a scale of newsworthiness but still were intended to keep the tone of Trump’s news as negative as possible. Anywhere. Any time. And any way.