Trump’s only news interest is the truth that he provides
Ruth Marcus
After post-truth comes all-fake.
The election of Donald Trump has seen the flowering of the post-truth landscape. Emotion outranks fact; believing makes it so. We are all Tinker Bell now. Clap if you believe in voter fraud. Clap if you doubt a human role in climate change.
So when the president-elect claims, with no basis in reality, that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” the customary burden of proof is flipped: Where, his minions ask, with no hint of embarrassment, is the evidence that the assertion is untrue?
“I don’t know that that is a false statement, George, and neither do you,” Vice President-elect Mike Pence told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
In this post-truth universe, institutions — news media, the intelligence community — are drained of all credibility. Thus Trump summarily rejected not only the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the election on Trump’s behalf but even the less controversial assessment that Russia was behind the hacking.
“Personally, it could be Russia. I don’t really think it is,” Trump told Chris Wallace. “They don’t know and I don’t know.” Yes, intelligence can be wrong, a point the Trump team seized on Friday in a response to The Washington Post’s report: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
But appropriate skepticism about intelligence is one thing — self-interested dismissal without engaging in this inquiry is quite another. This behavior was shocking enough coming from a major-party nominee. From a president-elect, it is appallingly irresponsible.
With facts passé, the next move is to reduce all news to the same level of distrust and disbelief. If nothing is true, then everything can be false.
“Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue — FAKE NEWS!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.
Transition spokesman Sean Spicer, disputing a report that Russia hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer system, tweeted that the story was “Exhibit #1 in the fake news.” And Newt Gingrich made the connection even more explicit: “The idea of The New York Times being worried about fake news is really weird,” he told a chuckling Sean Hannity on Fox News. “The New York Times is fake news.”
Journalism is an inher- ently imperfect profession. We write the first rough draft of history — as best we can, subject to correction and revision. But there is a difference between inevitably flawed and intentionally false. To deliberately blur this distinction is to seek to undermine the central role of media in a free society.
This is where Trump has gone beyond the pale. The tone of his unrelenting assault on the “dishonest media” — “these people are the lowest form of life” — is more menacing than any president since Nixon.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that he would prefer to have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. The Trump team would clearly make a different choice.
If that is not within his reach, Trump is going for second best: a society in which all truth is malleable and all news suspect. Whose voice, whose vision, whose authority will then be trusted? Trump doesn’t say, but it is not hard to guess.