After more than two weeks of buildup, my fellow press critic Donald Trump finally tweeted a link to his Fake News Awards. The awards, which he deemed important, were selected to single out “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” for proper scorn.
But Trump’s list of 11 winners (or losers, depending on your perspective) doesn’t come close to serving the grand buffet of “Dishonesty & Bad Reporting” he promised us. His list fixates on a botched stock-market prediction made by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, errors of fact and reporting that either the offending new organization or other outlet corrected, and de minimis mistakes made by Washington Post and Time magazine reporters in tweets. Proving that methodology isn’t his strong suit, Trump’s 11th prize goes to “RUSSIA COLLUSION!” but names no news outlet guilty of making that assertion. “Russian collusion is perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people,” the award stipulates. “THERE IS NO COLLUSION!”
If the Fake News Awards were a meal, they would be a maggoty helping of twice-fried ground corn cob.
The Trump awards come as a letdown because he’s been tub-thumping about fake news incessantly since December 2016. According to Factbase, which collects his spoken and written statements in searchable form, he has called some press organization or reporter “fake news” at nearly 300 times. Given his strong views on the topic, you’d expect some stinging specificity to his criticism. But most of the time he uses a crop duster to paint the entire press corps with his gripe and to disparage stories that don’t flatter him. The Washington Post is fake news, he has said in blanket censure. He expresses the same about CNN, NBC, the New York Times and ABC and CBS, often without bothering to stipulate what, exactly, is fake.
Trump lives to make the generalized complaints about the press, such as this gem from February 2017, “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election.” (The national polls, it turns out, correctly predicted Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote victory; it was the state polls that were off base.)
He also likes to pounce on news stories that later turn out to be true. Remember last March when he claimed those reports of “big infighting in the Trump” administration were more fake news? Guess which administration now holds the record for first-year staff departures?
Perhaps the most ridiculous of all Trump’s fake news charges came in his blanket assertion that “many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media.” The publication of Fire and Fury puts a counterspin on that avowal, doesn’t it?
In deriding the Fake News Awards I make no attempt to suggest that the press doesn’t ever err. It does, as the daily correction column in newspapers attest. My point is that Trump operates in bad faith when he talks this sort of trash about the press. He would have you believe that every error we make is deliberate, that journalists have somehow ginned up a unified conspiracy of lies and mendacities against him. The problem with that theory is that journalists regard themselves as competitors, not co-conspiracists, and they take almost as much delight in proving the competition wrong as they do in breaking an original story. This ability to prove the other guy wrong has grown in recent years as news organizations have hired additional hands to fact-check and cover the making of the news. Where egregious “fake news” exists, journalists have strong incentives to track it down.
Trump, a practiced hand at manipulating the press from his days as a running character in the New York tabloids, knows this. He deliberately uses the cry of fake news to addle the concentration of casual readers and viewers. Trump works his fake news accusations the way the totalitarian state works the villain Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Operating behind the scenes, Goldstein becomes the cause of all confusion, calamity and intrigue plaguing the state. Trump performs a similar sleight of hand by accusing the press of bedeviling and undermining his administration. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Goldstein is the subject of the daily TV broadcast, “Two Minutes Hate,” which unites the people behind the state as they rage against his malevolence. In press conferences, tweets and speeches, Trump pulls a similar trick, using broad and vague denunciations to blame the fake news for his shortcomings.
Trump doesn’t really hate the press, as I argued two months ago. He relies on it as a scapegoat and as something to push against when he needs an applause line. On the occasions that his fake-news condemnations don’t rile the faithful, he has an even better villain to fall back on—Hillary Clinton. In recent months Trump has blamed her for the North Korea nuke missile imbroglio, charged her and the Democratic National Committee of “real collusion” with Russia, and demanded that she be investigated for her role in the Uranium One “scandal” and for her handling of the emails.
Trump doesn’t care how fake his charges are. As long as they make news.