ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Unmasked. Tim Graham
Читать онлайн.Название Unmasked
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781630061166
Автор произведения Tim Graham
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Trump’s critics will point out that he has a history of pushing his own fake news. He can be reckless with conspiracy theories. He toyed for years with the unproven charge that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. (As opposed to Obama’s fairy tale that his father hung around with him in Hawaii until he was two, when actually his mother took him back to the mainland within a month of his birth.) During the primary campaign, Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer used grainy old black-and-white photos to suggest that Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald” before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Trump made no effort to denounce the slander. He also bragged about a level of wealth that no serious analyst believes. His willingness to play loose with false information—or create it himself—adds a layer of outrage within the sanctimonious press.
National media leaders insist that they should be honored and respected as the arbiters of fact. Many stories on television and in print contain facts, but they also carry a lot of opinions that masquerade as facts, such as the “fact” that the Clintons are innocent every time they’re caught in a lie—or criminal act. Facts can be spun. Or be nonexistent. Or be counterfeit.
It’s a matter of degree. There is biased news, false news, and fake news.
Biased news appears when the facts or the sources of a story are arranged to deliver a particular perspective that is in keeping with the opinions of the author. It is an everyday phenomenon in the press—everywhere. In fact, one can argue that all news is biased. It starts with the decision to label something as news. Look at the front pages of the Washington Post and the Washington Times on any given day and you’ll find a wide discrepancy in story selection. Each paper can defend its choice of “front-page” stories. But that judgment was predicated on subjective opinions, and that is bias.
That same bias is found in numerous other ways inside a story. The headline. The people interviewed and the length given to them. The tone of the questions. The edited responses. The conclusion reached. Bias, bias, bias.
A good reporter understands this. A good reporter seeks truth and commits to putting aside his or her prejudices—no easy task—in the process.
When President George H. W. Bush died and President Trump attended a memorial service at the National Cathedral with the former presidents, the Washington Post put Trump’s discomfort on the front page under the headline “Despite Sitting with Predecessors, Trump Stands Alone at Funeral.” Reporter Philip Rucker placed Trump in a mortifying spot: “First was the president Trump said was illegitimate (Barack Obama); then the first lady he called a profligate spender of taxpayer dollars (Michelle Obama); then the president he called the worst abuser of women (Bill Clinton); then the first lady and secretary of state he said should be in jail (Hillary Clinton); and then the president he said was the second-worst behind Obama (Jimmy Carter) and his wife, Rosalynn.” Rucker had no space to counter this with the choice epithets Obama or the Clintons or the Carters lobbed at Trump.
On the same day, the Washington Times put Trump’s attendance on page A-9 under the headline “With Trump on Fringes, Presidents Club Assembles to Attend Bush Funeral.” It was an Associated Press dispatch that noted that both sides were hostile, not just one: “But the staid group of Oval Office occupants has been disturbed since Donald Trump’s election. And since his swearing-in, Mr. Trump has spurned most contact with his predecessors—and they have snubbed him in return.”
False news is when media outlets make a mistake. Sadly, this is where the arrogance of the press rears its ugly head. Like Fonzie from the old TV show Happy Days, they seem clinically unable to declare they were wr-wr-wr-wrong. And a correction? Not on your life.
After the Benghazi consulate attack in 2012, the Obama administration shamelessly tried to argue that the killing of four Americans was not a terrorist attack but a protest of an Islamophobic video on YouTube. The networks ran this argument for days . . . until the facts overwhelmed the White House talking points. The networks made a mistake and eventually corrected it. But then when Brian Williams had a chance to press President Obama on this false claim, he merely asked, “Have you been happy with the intelligence?” What mattered was whether Obama was pleased, not whether he mangled the facts.
Fake news is the inexcusable and the essence of journalistic dishonesty. The journalist knows that what he or she is presenting is either false or designed to advance an agenda. In 2004, Dan Rather had his producer Mary Mapes deliberately gather testimony from a Bush-hating malcontent pushing forged documents, ignoring document authenticators while deliberately refusing to interview firsthand witnesses from the Texas Air National Guard who would say the opposite because they wanted to sink Bush’s reelection with the fake Air National Guard story. To this day, Rather insists that the “truth” was on their side and “We have to somehow get back to integrity in the news.” The carelessness of the reporting underlined the malignant intentions.
Whether a news item is false or fake is only a matter of intentions. Neither is reliable information and as a result undermines confidence in the media outlet offering the reporting. When people suspect an ideological motivation behind a “news” report, they lose trust in the authenticity of what they see and hear from those “nonpartisan” journalists.
With Trump the ideological opposition was (and still is) so militant in its “reporting” that when he labeled it all fake news, his supporters were ready to accept that.
Some suggest that he might use a less combative synonym for “fake.” Maybe “artificial” or “contrived.” But why? When a reporter invents facts, she should be shamed publicly. Individually or collectively, when news outlets set the agenda for public discussion and tell us what we all should be talking about and how we should view that issue and it’s all predicated on a lie, they deserve to be punished severely in the court of public opinion. When reporters continue to promote the line that Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, had raised his hands and said to a policeman, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” knowing a thorough investigation found that he’d done no such thing, they deserved to be publicly humiliated.
Fake news is also thematic. “News” often is based on slippery underlying assumptions. The Ferguson falsehood projected a belief that white Southerners are naturally racist, and so too are opponents of immigration, and the same should be said about cops. However, the media’s same assumptions about minorities—in their case, their victimhood—cause them deliberately to suppress news that might make people assume that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists or avoid reporting on black-on-black violence in big cities. That narrative isn’t “helpful.”
The term “fake news” resonates with Trump voters because people are frustrated with arrogant media elites dictating to them what is and isn’t an acceptable belief system. For eight years of the Clintons and eight years of the Obamas, they saw these self-righteous watchdogs deliberately seek to avoid every Democratic scandal. Each example was “not news.” But when there’s just a whiff of wrongdoing on the other side—hold the presses! The Republican is always found guilty until he can prove his innocence, and even that won’t be enough.
Since they first developed a taste for their own power in opposing the Vietnam War and forcing Richard Nixon to resign in the Watergate scandal, our national news corporations have become increasingly bold in picking winners and losers, explicitly telling voters who they must elect and what “landmark” legislation they must support. When the people fail in their election choices, they are compared to toddlers throwing tantrums. To repeat Peter Jennings’ 1994 quote in its entirety, “Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week.”
The media then try to run the country between the elections, to enlighten obstreperous citizens, the “poor, uneducated, and easy-to-command” types. If they fail in stopping a man’s cause, they cock the trigger and then fire the final bullet: character assassination. The goal is for your values to become as radioactive in the court of public opinion as the man or cause you supported.
As