Real vs. fake news
In the wake of two natural disasters and the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history, President Trump still finds time to tweet about “fake news” — which is to say, news reporting he doesn’t much like.
First thing yesterday morning, having recently returned from visiting shooting victims in Las Vegas, he tweeted this:
“Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!”
Trump has been on a tear since NBC News reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had threatened to resign this summer and, during a subsequent meeting of the national security council at the Pentagon, had called Trump a “moron.” In fact, Tillerson was forced to call a news conference Wednesday to deny the resignation story, although he finessed the “moron” part of the account. Let’s just say Tillerson has truly earned his title as the nation’s chief diplomat.
Also Wednesday the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), did indeed offer up an interim report, confirming Russian meddling in the 2016 election both by hacking into the emails of Democratic operatives and in numerous attempts — all of them unsuccessful — to test the vulnerabilities of election systems in 21 states.
Nothing fake about any of that — but again a narrative that Trump continues to disparage because he seems to think it casts doubt on the legitimacy of his election.
“You can’t walk away from this and believe that Russia’s not currently active,” Burr said.
The committee has found ample evidence of Russia’s very real attempt to spread fake news, especially via social media — an attempt that continued right up through and in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings. Sowing social unrest with racially-inspired propaganda is simply their latest tool.
And it’s one Trump ought to be concerned about. But that would mean acknowledging the importance of the real news media — something he is congenitally ill-equipped to do.