A couple weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article outlining fake news sites that anonymous group PropOrNot had compiled. Sensationalist website articles were among a plethora of reasons blamed for Donald Trump's election win. It comes at a convenient time, when trust in the mainstream media has hit record lows and the President-elect consistently finds himself circumventing regular mediums (aka Twitter) to make headlines. What better way to reaffirm trust in mainstream media than go after the competition? Granted, the MSM didn't wet themselves over PropOrNot's list.
In a scathing article for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden/NSA leak fame) outlined some of the reasons why this story wasn't picked up, calling it a "McCarthyite blacklist" and shredding the hypocrisy of an anonymous group denouncing alternative media. You know when Buzzfeed staffers criticize substance that it's going to be a train wreck.
There are a ton of issues with this story I'd like to tackle but I want to focus on one consequence of an emphasis on truth. It simply doesn't accurately account for ethics in journalism. When tens of thousands of e-mails were made public by Wikileaks, CNN took it upon themselves to say that it's illegal for normal citizens to possess the e-mails. "Only the media is allowed." Could that possibly be because CNN was implicated in numerous stories of working with the DNC, including one that got Donna Brazille axed for leaking town hall questions to the Clinton campaign? The answers Clinton gave to those questions did occur, so they were real in the sense that they were accurate positions of the campaign. They weren't genuine, though. Campaigns are meant to play by a certain set of rules, ones that in these cases (and many others) were broken. Collusion between politicians and the media can't be accurately measured on a true vs. fake scale. Scripted, misleading, drive-by media can fill itself with factual statements but still betray the truth vs. power dynamic.
Wikileaks has come under
fire as being a tool of Russia, but if exposing corruption could turn
the tide of an election, Russians and fake news cannot be the only forces accused of eroding the democratic process. This was not just an "invasive cyberintrusion," as Ms. Brazile called it; this string of events and others like it are a tax levied against institutions with skeletons in their closet, a corruption tax. The price that CNN, NBC, the New York Times, and others are paying for a very visible and long-standing relationship with the government.
It wouldn't be much of a long-standing relationship if I left the previous administration clean in all of this. For a fiery
interview you can check out The Daily Show's Jon Stewart drilling former New York Times reporter Judith Miller on the media's role in pursuing the Iraq War. Did all of these papers and television stations have sources telling them there were WMD's (weapons of mass destruction) and to be wary of Saddam? Sure, but a few neglected to mention being spoon-fed information from the CIA. Again, we have a story going beyond the real vs. fake system. There were "real" sources, but truth has to account for motive or else it moves from being a truth-keeping force to damage control, a peace-keeping force. The dangerous irony here, whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Russia, is that the mainstream media keeps making peace with pushing for war.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
