New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg took his standard place on the front of Monday’s Business Day, hyperventilating this time about the pushback to Kellyanne Conway’s comment about the “Bowling Green massacre” being a turning point in the battle against “fake news.”
The headline wasn’t subtle: “The Massacre That Wasn’t: A ‘Fake News’ Turning Point.” The text box cheered: “The internet acted quickly to dismantle a Trump adviser’s false claim.”
There were so many instant internet spoofs making fun of Kellyanne Conway’s now-famous “Bowling Green Massacre” that it’s hard to pick a favorite. Gun to my head, I’d say mine was the Twitter meme that showed a brass plaque dedicated to the names of the poor souls left for dead on Bowling Green’s grassy killing field. It was blank.
Because the idea of a terrorist massacre is always hilarious!
The very fact that you probably know all this means that the “Bowling Green Massacre” may go down in the record of the Trump presidency as the first break in the “fake news” clouds that have cast such gloom over our fair and once (relatively) true republic.
The same internet that enabled false stories to run unchecked through news feeds during the election year dispatched new white blood cells that attacked Ms. Conway’s “alternate facts” with “true facts” (a redundant term that I guess we’re stuck with for now). Their most effective attack was traditional reporting, in many cases from news organizations that have doubled down on fact-checking, joined by newfangled memes that accentuate the truth.
The Massacre That Wasn’t showed that while Facebook, Google and Twitter take steps to combat nefarious hoaxes, they are already playing host to an organic correction movement led by ordinary users who are crowdsourcing reality.
It’s early. Vigilance, and continuing improvements throughout the news business, remain necessary. But the tale of the “massacre” could be the start of something new.
Rutenberg celebrated a former liberal blogger who spread the word.
In this case, the guy was Joe Sonka, a staff writer for the Insider Louisville website. He was having a beer at a bar called the Backdoor when “someone texted me that Conway said something insane,” Mr. Sonka told me.
As a reporter -- and onetime liberal blogger -- in Kentucky for several years, Mr. Sonka knew what Ms. Conway seemed to be referring to when he went home to check it out. In 2011, the federal authorities arrested two Iraqi refugees who were plotting to send money and weapons to Al Qaeda in Iraq from their new homes in Bowling Green. The episode led to a slowdown in Iraqi immigration as the Obama administration reworked vetting procedures.
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In the end, social media and journalistic scrutiny aligned with comedy to right a wrong pretty definitively. That it happened so organically showed that false “facts” might not always be the stubborn things so many people fear they are becoming.
Then Rutenberg made an ill-advised foray into musical theatre.
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To understand how deep those fears go, just look at how “1984,” by George Orwell, has climbed up the best-seller lists nearly 70 years after its debut. A “1984” stage adaptation is even heading to Broadway. (How about a Hamiltonesque musical: “2 and 2 make 5? Don’t give me that jive!”)
I wouldn’t quit my day job. Then he saluted the paper’s previous biased coverage.
As the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani put it recently, Orwell’s classic seems “all too familiar,” capturing “a world in which the government insists that reality is not ‘something objective, external, existing in its own right.’”
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The Bowling Green episode made such a splash because it played directly into concerns that the Trump administration would use untrue assertions to rally support for its agenda while denigrating as “dishonest” all the valid reporting pointing out the falsehoods.
Rutenberg eventually got around to a few bits of his colleagues’ own fake news (a lot more examples here), before doubling back with demands on Conway.
And Ms. Conway was right when she wrote that “honest mistakes abound.”
After all, The Washington Post admitted over the weekend that several details in a column about internal White House strife over the president’s executive order on immigration were in dispute. A few days before that, WJBK-TV of Detroit walked back a report about a woman who died in Iraq supposedly after Mr. Trump’s new policy blocked her entry to the United States.
Yet by the end of the weekend, it was Ms. Conway’s credibility that was receiving the most scrutiny (which she described as unfair and coming from “a lot of the haters” in her interview with Mr. Kurtz).
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It would be a positive development if Ms. Conway embraced the idea that the term “honest mistakes” can apply to reporters, too, as it would be if everybody -- including journalists -- doubly committed to getting the facts right, without hysteria or misfires. Too optimistic?
Rutenberg again found the funny side.
Eventually, the Bowling Green memes led to mock street memorials with signs like “Never Remember.” They had made it IRL, or “In Real Life,” which, the new administration is learning, has a way of sneaking up on you.
