Lots of Americans find fake news annoying.
No, not the online detritus crafted by foreign pranksters and hooligans that proliferated during the 2016 election, but the phrase itself. According to a Marist poll this week, nearly a quarter of the American public finds “fake news” to be the most annoying term to appear in casual conversation, trailing only “whatever” in giving folks fits.
Of course, that irritating turn of phrase is a favorite of President Donald Trump’s. And his constant use of it should have everyone not just annoyed, but downright concerned.
It’s no secret that Trump likes to shout or tweet “FAKE NEWS” at any article that portrays him in a negative manner. He did it on Tuesday, in fact. And again on Wednesday.
The phrase was a constant tool on the campaign trail for Trump to deride and dismiss the journalists looking into the many unsavory aspects of his background. Trump was so enamored with the term that he tried to claim that he invented it, or something.
Thanks to Trump and others like him who wield “fake news” as a weapon, the phrase has been utterly divorced from its original meaning. Once upon a time, it meant writings that were crafted to mislead by those with malicious intent; trolls wanted readers to click on their ridiculous websites, so they made up “news” out of whole cloth to dupe the gullible. Now, Trump and his ilk use “fake news” to describe real efforts by real news organizations that they simply don’t like.
The reasons we should find this concerning are two-fold: One, actual “fake news” – the ginned-up garbage that is pure fiction – can have real consequences. It’s how we wound up with an armed vigilante showing up at a Washington pizza shop to investigate a child-sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton associates. It needs to be identified and discredited, wherever possible, lest someone get hurt.
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But second, attacking legitimate information as fake diminishes the effect of real news and gives partisans the ability to dismiss out of hand anything detrimental to their cause, no matter how impactful it could and should be.
Which, as so many stories do these days, comes back to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In recent days, both conservative media and garden-variety Republicans in Congress have been making a lot of noise about Mueller’s investigation being corrupt and corruptible. Seizing on reports that Mueller let go of a member of his team who had sent anti-Trump text messages – private messages that were turned over to that dreaded fake media, mind you – the right is claiming that the whole Mueller operation is so swampy, to use a phrase, that it should be cast into the sea.
It’s easy to interpret this as the right softening the ground should Trump decide he’s had it and fire Mueller. With the news that Mueller’s probe is going to extend into next year – contrary to what Trump’s legal team has apparently been telling him – and that the coming phase is going to be even more contentious than have been the proceedings so far, it’s not hard to see the president’s petulance getting the better of him and leading to a Mueller dismissal.
But what if something else happens? What if Mueller finds something, and it just doesn’t stick because the “fake news” narrative is embedded so deep in America’s psyche?
To be clear, that does not happen. Yes, news organizations make mistakes, but reporters aren’t sitting around cranking out fantasy for the news section. The few instances in which that has happened are so rare, memorable and ridiculous that there are literally movies made about them. But Americans, goaded on by irresponsible leaders and partisan media types, are turning the whole fake news narrative into a stew in their minds that increasingly cooks into the belief that nothing is credible if not served by the preferred ideological messenger.
The dynamic I’m worried about played out in the recent Alabama special election, where an extremely well-done, responsible piece of journalism credibly alleging that Republican candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted and otherwise pursued teenagers while in his 30s was dismissed out of hand as “fake news,” thanks to Moore and his conservative cronies. Per the exit polls, more than 40 percent of voters believed the allegations were false and those people voted overwhelmingly for Moore. A small change in voting and the election goes the other way.
Something like that could certainly happen at the national level, with real charges against Trump dismissed by the president and his allies as “fake” and voters not knowing what to believe, so choosing to go with the guy who has the bully pulpit. And maybe it won’t be one Senate seat at stake then, but whether our democracy can function free from outside interference. There are already worrying signs that Trump has crafted an alternate universe in his own brain in which Russia did nothing at all, never mind what all the U.S. intelligence agencies and plenty of others say about it.
I, of course, can’t know if the people who answered that Moore poll truly didn’t believe the allegations leveled against him or simply chose “not to believe” them because of partisan blinkers. Partisanship, as they say, is a hell of a drug. I hope my concerns are all overblown and people choose to manifest their annoyance at the proliferating use of “fake news” by having more faith in good, credible reporting.
Because we can’t have a free and fair democracy if we don’t have some semblance of a shared set of facts. Just like every lie Trump tells matters because of its degradation of what truth even is, so too does his every attack on legitimate information as “fake.” It may be the case that an outright assault on our democracy gets yadda-yadda’d away because that shared set of facts isn’t allowed to exist. That’s far from annoying; it’s downright deplorable.
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