‘Fake news’ comeuppance
President Trump and the morally bankrupt Alabama Senate candidate he’s hugging ever closer, Roy Moore, never miss an opportunity to attack the Washington Post and other news outlets as supposed factories of fabrication. Monday, the paper put those cynical “fake news” smears to shame — by exposing, through exemplary real journalism, a dastardly and dishonest attempt to impugn the integrity of reporters.
The would-be impugner: James O’Keefe, a conservative gotcha video activist.
His goal, perfectly aligned with Moore’s and Trump’s: to discredit the Post’s stellar reporting on Moore’s habit, as a thirtysomething man, of pursing teenage girls, including once initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old.
O’Keefe’s assumption, one that Trump cynically feeds at every turn, was that newswriters and researchers, blinded by partisanship, are out to do ad hominem hit jobs, even to the point of swallowing and spreading nonsense.
So he and his conspirators sent a woman peddling a fabricated story that she had been a teenage victim of Moore’s, seemingly sure that would draw out bad behavior by the hated liberal media.
The Post, like any newspaper worth its salt, did due diligence and discovered the claims were lies.
Let those in thrall to O’Keefe — including Trump, who in 2015 gave Project Veritas $10,000 — swallow some hard truths.
One: Falsely claiming to have been sexually abused is bottom-dwelling behavior that makes it less likely that legitimate rape victims will be believed. There’s no way to repair the damage done.
Two: The Washington Post, like the many other legitimate news organizations Trump lambasts as “the enemy of the American people,” is interested first and foremost in the truth. A well-researched story is the coin of the realm.
Which brings us to point three, most inconvenient for Trump and Moore: O’Keefe’s failed fraud underscored the honest truth: The Post’s reporting on Moore’s sexual pursuit of teenagers, which Moore has written off as a “charade” orchestrated by “liberal media lapdogs,” got it right.