Don’t panic about ‘ alternative facts’

Since Donald Trump upended everything we thought we knew about politics, hands have been wrung and ink has been spilled about the “post- factual age.” How could the 2016 candidate with the worst Politifact rating be the winner? How could the Trump administration claim its new press secretary was using “alternative facts”? Do facts still matter — and if they don’t, will real journalism stay relevant? Or is the “lamestream” media a relic?

We shouldn’t overreact. Now that President Trump has taken the oath and the business of governance has begun, the impact of fake news and “alternative outlets” will be revealed as vastly overblown. “Traditional” news media will still control the national conversation. Policymakers will still have to build their days around what they report.

Let’s start with the numbers. Infowars, which received tremendous attention as a haven for conspiracy theories during the campaign, has about 6 million unique monthly visitors. Breitbart had roughly 19 million in October 2016 when interest in the presidential campaign was peaking.

The USA TODAY Network, by contrast, had more than 122 million unique visitors in November. CNN’s monthly average is about 105 million. The Washington Post and The New York Times, meanwhile, rose to about 100 million apiece just before the election.

It’s not just the sheer numbers, though — it’s also who reads which outlets. Politico polled congressional staffers and lobbyists on what they read, and the results were no surprise. Among the most read were The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Hill, Roll Call and, of course, Politico itself. Mainstream trade publications also matter. Education Week, for instance, has more than 600,000 unique monthly visitors, and you can bet the people crafting federal regulatory interpretations take its stories seriously.

As for sites like Infowars, “credible” people cannot cite them and remain credible, at least not with policymakers. Former Georgia congressman Jack Kingston, for instance, tweeted a link to an Infowars story. He got lambasted by reporters and conservatives and deleted the tweet in an hour.

Finally, few things control the national conversation like a scandal, but the scandal must have some grounding in fact in order to matter. Fact- based scandals dominated the conversation around the campaign, whether it was Clinton’s emails or Trump’s “locker room talk” aboard the Access Hollywood bus. The “scandals” unearthed by alternative outlets don’t have the same impact. For instance, when Alex Jones “reported” that Hillary Clinton was a devil worshipper, the Clinton campaign, to put it mildly, did not feel compelled to offer a denial.

Even as fake news proliferates and fringe conspiracies creep into online interactions, the “lamestream” media will still control the national conversation. Facts still matter.