A Lot of People Are Saying by Nancy L. Rosenblum;

Author:Nancy L. Rosenblum;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Fake news conspiracism is not a theory—it is a rallying cry. The mainstream media in Trump’s characterization is “the opposition party”33 and, worse, the “enemy of the people.”34 Here, too, rage and repetition are key to delegitimation: “I’m making this presentation directly to the American people.… The press, honestly, is out of control.… I watch CNN. It’s so much anger and hatred.… The public gets it.… They start screaming at CNN.” The next day the president tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing@nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American People.”35 At a South Carolina rally, he singled out the reporters covering his event: “These people back here are the worst.… They are so dishonest.… Absolute scum. Remember that. Scum. Scum. Totally dishonest people.”36 At a subsequent rally, Trump again raised the specter of violence, proclaiming that he would not execute reporters: “I hate some of these people, I hate ’em,” Trump said. “But I would never kill them.… Uh, let’s see, uh.… No, I would never do that.”37

We quote Trump’s words at length in order to emphasize that the charge of fake news diverges from the way in which politicians regularly vilify the media. Think of Richard Nixon: “The press is the enemy,” he said, “because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”38 Nixon was speaking privately to his closest advisers; Trump is pugnaciously vilifying the press as a public enemy in public. His aim is to destroy the legitimacy of the press as an independent source of knowledge by representing it as an organized conspiracy.

It bears saying that reporting is an irreplaceable resource for government accountability. The press provides the forum where public figures and citizens bear witness to events. There is no substitute for the service that a free press renders to democracy—a press corps that sees it as a professional responsibility to engage in a process of employing reliable sources to render an account of events that is as accurate as possible. The point of incessant charges of “fake news” is to deny standing to the press not with the comparatively benign portrait of an institution that does not care about getting things right but with the dark portrait of an institution with nefarious reasons for misleading the public. The conspiracist substitute for the standards that constitute journalistic integrity is, as we have said, repetition and the affirmation of unsupported claims. Consider this exchange between the president and conservative news anchor Bill O’Reilly. Asked whether there is any validity to reports that Trump is unable to back up his claim that three million illegal alien votes cost him the popular vote, the president replied by invoking the only source of validation that mattered: “Many people have come out and said I’m right.”39

These conspiracist charges have an impact. “Nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (92%) think that traditional news outlets report false or misleading stories at least sometimes,” and “more than two-thirds (65%) say fake news is usually reported because ‘people have an agenda.

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