The real fake news

The antipathy to Donald Trump, which in its keenest manifestations is fierce and relentless, is a disabling set of mind, nowhere more so than in the reporting on or about him.

Contempt for Trump — the conviction that he is some sort of dangerous historical “accident” in the presidential office — serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment and analytic neutrality. To those who oppose him, particularly those in the news media, Trump is regarded as just SO bad that standards can be virtuously abandoned, and neutrality and dispassion set aside, so long as it helps (such is the hope) to hurt Trump, and, maybe, get rid of him.

The new rule is: anything that can weaken Trump’s standing, sever his connection with the populist base, and help to bring him down is fair game. Hence the sloppiness and one-directional nature of most Trump news. In just the last few weeks, Brian Ross at ABC, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN each had to correct or deny major stories that had all been wrong in the same direction. They hurt Trump.

Stories, however, that might hint at some aspects of competency or adroitness in Trump’s handling of affairs are either passed over or given the most desultory treatment. How many tins of Pepsi Trump drinks gets more coverage than the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, which has occurred under his watch. Under Obama that would have generated skyscraper headlines; under Trump you can search for it in the back pages and fine print.

When the majority of the American media failed in their coverage of the presidential election, they had to find some excuse for their massive incompetence. The New York Times, with all their resources, and after two full years of daily coverage of the campaign, was nonetheless projecting Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at a full 92 per cent on election night itself. That was at least better than the pathologically anti-Trump HuffPost, which had Hillary’s chances set at a modest 98 per cent! Such was the state of American journalism, these companies barely allowed for the mere possibility that Trump could win. Under their professional eye, he was just a sideshow, even in the very hours before he actually won.

These two — the Times and HuffPost — can stand for a large set of the American press, both traditional and online. Their reading of the American election was the greatest journalistic failure — the largest act of group incompetence — in decades. This failure fostered the need for some excuse for how they got so much so wrong.

They couldn’t just step out honestly and say: “Hey, we despised this guy so much that it really warped our thinking and twisted our coverage, blocked out what we didn’t want to see. We were so mad at him we could not see.” That would An attendee holds a sign during a rally held by U.S. President Donald Trump in Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 8. Fake News — insofar as an effort to delegitimize Trump — has been a project in itself, writes Rex Murphy. have been the truthful and honourable thing to do. So, obviously, it was not adopted. Instead, the answer they did come up with, quickly and conveniently enough, was Fake News.

Now there has always been fake news. Newspaper, TV, magazines have always, to some degree, had a slant, an overall editorial direction. But the Fake News that we heard about for most of 2017, and were warned against by journalism’s elders, and was so deplored by the monks of NPR and PBS, was something new and altogether more sinister. This Fake News was a project in itself, something crafted specifically and particularly, and deployed maliciously, by the fiends of the Trump campaign.

The way the term Fake News was invoked by newscasters, panels, and journalism profs was actually kind of scary. Fake News was a threat to the republic; it enjoyed a corrupting power that effortlessly ousted the voices of the real media, and blunted the rational minds of the electorate. That Fake News was powerful stuff.

Actually, it was just a lot of silly rationalization for poor coverage, an excuse for incompetence on the part of much of the professional press. Fake News, no surprise, is itself fake news. That’s the primary thing to know about it. It is a product of the eagerly conspiratorial minds of the anti-Trumpers and Never Trumpers. It is quite interesting to note how the rational liberal observers of 2017 are so invested in conspiracies. They think the idiot Trump — for that is how they see him — set in motion complicated collusions with Putin and the Russians, and simultaneously undermined the national media with Fake News, and lulled an entire nation into the belief that he could not be elected.

Not bad for a 69-year-old loon and lout.

Such has been the substance of the coverage of the Trump presidency since the day he took office. There’s the — forgive the expression — real fake news.