Rory Smith on... fake news
Rory Smith is a Fourfourtwo columnist and chief football correspondent at the New York Times. This month: how Trump has copied football’s trick
Donald Trump’s trick is a good one. So good, in fact, that he decided to unveil it early, like a band starting off a brand new album with the catchiest song. A few days before he became the 45th President of the United States of America, the tangerine-tinted former WWE star gave a press conference. He was, as he always seems to be, in belligerent mood, particularly towards those outlets he feels have not given him a fair hearing. CNN, the television news channel, got a particularly hard time.
“Not you,” the soon-to-be leader of the free world said to the station’s reporter, when he had raised his hand in an attempt to ask a question. Trump scowled, and then smirked: the sneer of a child who has just happened upon a particularly cruel and cutting insult. “You’re fake news.”
This is Trump’s trick: to take a charge that has been thrown at him, and hurl it at somebody else. It is, essentially, the playground meme – “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?” – being used as a rhetorical flourish in what is supposed to be a pretty grown-up environment.
Of course, it’s Trump, so he hasn’t quite got it right. The term ‘fake news’ was coined to describe all those stories that appeared on your Facebook feed in the run-up to the Brexit vote and the US election last year: the ones about how the European Union had 27,542 pages of regulations about what a cabbage was, or the ones about how Hillary Clinton was actually a yeti. They were all published on suspiciously amateurish-looking websites, with addresses suggesting they are in Macedonia.
Trump, on the other hand, uses it to describe things that he doesn’t agree with, or negative interpretations of his actions, or anything that reflects badly on him. It is such a good trick, though, that it works anyway, convincing his followers that criticism is falsehood, blurring the very idea of what truth is. It is not, though, a new trick. It is one very familiar to anyone with a passing interest in football.
Most of the time, football reflects the society in which it currently exists: the sport itself, and the atmosphere around it, is given its shape by the values and beliefs of the people who play it and watch it. Just occasionally, though, it gets ahead of the game. And on the subject of fake news, it’s so far ahead that it feels like society is only now catching up to football.
The thing that might leap to mind here, talking about football, and fake news, is the incessant plague of transfer rumours that occupy back pages of papers and drive readers to websites every summer and winter. Nothing can match the online traffic that a transfer story gets; the assumption is that journalists often just make them up in order to get some of those juicy, revenue-building hits.
From personal experience, that’s not true: most transfer stories, certainly in more traditional publications, will be based on something – a tip from a contact, a phone call from an agent, a word from a manager. That they sometimes, frequently, turn out not to be right is more due to changing circumstance than a desire to mislead.
Transfer stories are a consequence, though, rather than a cause of football’s fake news environment. They attract readers because football supporters desperately want them to be true: you want your team to be bringing in a glamorous Spanish striker, or a doughty Italian defender. Maybe even Liam Ridgewell.
It is here that football and politics, all of a sudden, have something in common: what people want to be true is now more important than what is actually true. All of those people who clicked on the stories about Clinton being a yeti wanted them to be true, because they appealed to their tribal loyalty. They willed truth into them.
This happens all of the time in football. Truth is fluid. Managers (and players) will stand there after a game they have lost and blame the referee, or bemoan some imaginary foul, all to offer what Trump might recognise as alternative facts. Pundits will bend events to fit their interpretation. Club websites or Twitter feeds will pump out what is little short of propaganda, offering an almost flawless face to the world.
Fans may not encourage it, but in many ways they enable it. They go along with the manager when he says they should have been awarded a penalty, or claims a grand conspiracy against him. On social media – and this is new, something that doesn’t apply to fans in person – they react angrily to any and all criticism, seemingly determined to believe the perfect world being presented to them.
And, in the final parallel between sport and reality, when they hear something they do not like, they blame the mainstream media, accuse them of twisting the facts, of favouring the other team. Like Donald Trump, they cry fake news.
In the last year or so, Trump has taken all of that – that blind, partisan loyalty, that desire to find the truth that fits the belief, that distorting tribalism – and applied it to politics. He’s taken football’s trick, and taken over a whole country.
MANAGERS BLAME THE REF OR BEMOAN AN IMAGINARY FOUL, ALL TO OFFER WHAT TRUMP SEES AS ALTERNATIVE FACTS