PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote an editorial on Wednesday taking issue with President Trump’s declarations of “fake news.” Holan reported “Trump is so taken with the phrase ‘fake news,’ that he’s mentioned it at least 153 separate times in interviews, on Twitter and in speeches, according to a count compiled by PolitiFact.”
She noted that “PolitiFact has devoted many hours to knocking down fake news: accounts of events that never happened, from the frightening to the frivolous.”
But while she hates the phrase, she did not note that PolitiFact almost never evaluates whether journalists or their news stories are accurate or inaccurate. So while she may knock down “fake news,” largely by sketchy corners of the Internet, her site is not evaluating whether so-called “mainsteam media” news stories about President Trump are true or false.
Most often, PolitiFact found, his targets have been CNN (23 mentions in 2017) and NBC (19 mentions), followed by the New York Times (12 mentions) and the Washington Post (eight mentions). We found only one news outlet that had been singled out for praise during his discussions of fake news: Fox News.
Trump is particularly quick to label coverage "fake news" when the reports have unnamed sources, and unnamed sources seem to make Trump the most irate.
It’s understandable that public figures get angry when they’re accused of something but they don’t know who the source is, said Aly Colon, the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University.
"If President Trump doesn’t believe what is said, then he would believe it is fake, because it doesn’t fit into the reality that he accepts," Colon said.
If one thinks Colon does not have a dog in this fight of Trump vs. the "fake news" TV networks, note Colon was, before his latest job, the NBC News director of standards and practices.
This is the arrogance of the liberal media on the march – that anyone who refuses to accept their reporting as nonpartisan and ultra-factual has mental trouble with “the reality that he accepts.” But then Holan’s interviewees get more colorful in their analysis.
Other First Amendment advocates described Trump’s use of the term "fake news" as Orwellian, because it uses words to mean the opposite of their literal definition, as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
"It is a characteristic of authoritarian leaders, whether Communist or Nazi, to appropriate ordinary words and declare them to mean the opposite," said Bruce Johnson, a Seattle-based media lawyer. "Repressive regimes hold power by depriving their population of independent thinking and making the masses believe lies."
So! Should we drag Holan and her lawyer buddy into the “Fact Check Room” to ask whether President Trump is in fact analogous to “authoritarian leaders, Communist or Nazi”? Or is someone merely engaging in a mudslinging Democrat attack ad? After all, Bruce Johnson of Seattle has a long list of donations to Obama, Hillary, Bernie Sanders, Patty Murray, and so on.
The false assertions continued:
Trump’s threats are "simply unprecedented," said Sonja R. West, the Otis Brumby Distinguished Professor of First Amendment Law at the University of Georgia School of Law.
"While other presidents have certainly had their disagreements with particular stories or journalists, they still showed a basic level respect to the press as an institution and acknowledged the important role it plays," West said. "Having the president openly wage war on the press by trying to delegitimize it is extremely concerning."
Once again, Holan and her source might need a Fact Check. Elderly leftists would remind Holan this is exactly how they talked about Richard Nixon’s “war on the press” during the fight over publishing the Pentagon Papers. And when it comes to “unpredecented” attacks on the press, what about Barack Obama attacking Fox News? (Or is Fox not “the media”?)
For example, it was reported Obama told union leaders that Fox News was partly responsible for him “losing white males” who tune into the network to “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7.” Claiming Fox is the 24/7-Obama's-a-Muslim Channel is a transparently false charge. Or would the Holans of the world say "you can't trust that account...from anonymous sources."
Finally, Holan reports Trump’s "fake news" attacks confuse ideas about what is accurate and what is newsworthy, according to RonNell Andersen Jones, "a professor of law at the University of Utah who studies the First Amendment and media law." Jones said Trump has a bully pulpit to push back against fake news with evidence of the fakery. “Striking out at the press with nothing more than a bald label -- ‘fake news’ -- undercuts this central feature of our democracy and places the larger First Amendment framework at risk.”
This a classic media argument: that attacking the "legacy media" or undermining their general credibility is attacking "the First Amendment." Earth to the media: freedom of speech certainly includes the freedom to denounce liberal media bias and suggesting that their biased journalism is an assault on Constitutional values.
What Angie Holan was attempting to do this article was to strike out against the phrase “fake news” without taking any step to insist that what Trump claimed was “fake news” was actually accurate or inaccurate. The operating assumption is that anything the liberal media does is automatically accurate because of their history or branding or reputation.
For this, Holan quoted Andrew Seaman, ethics chair of the Society for Professional Journalists, addressing the idea of why readers or viewers should trust stories stuffed with anonymous sources: "My advice to the public is to always consider a news organization’s history and track record. The New York Times, Washington Post and others all have scandals in their pasts, but the overwhelming weight of evidence shows their journalism to be reliable and trustworthy."
Holan and Seaman and the rest somehow cannot imagine why Trump voters might decide not to trust the anonymous sources of a newspaper that put a commentary on the front page insisting it was their professional duty to prevent Trump from taking office: "you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional."
That's precisely what the "objective" media has been from Trump's first day as a candidate: "Oppositional." If Trump is presented as unprecedented in his threat to the Republic, it shouldn't be surprising that past media precedents of reliability aren't the right measurement for how fair or measured they might be now in marshaling shadowy Trump critics.
The media elites perpetually fail to imagine that someone might think it's fair that journalists who insult this president as a phony billionaire with a phony marriage who rose to fame with a phony "reality-TV" show might simply respond in kind.
