1
“FAKE NEWS!”:
President Trump’s Campaign Against the Media
on @realdonaldtrump
and Reactions To It on Twitter
A PEORIA Project White Paper
Michael Cornfield
GWU Graduate School of Political Management
April 10, 2019
This report was made possible by a generous grant from William Madway.
SUMMARY:
This white paper examines President Trump’s campaign to fan distrust of the news media (Fox
News excepted) through his tweeting of the phrase “Fake News (Media).” The report identifies
and illustrates eight delegitimation techniques found in the twenty-five most retweeted Trump
tweets containing that phrase between January 1, 2017 and August 31, 2018.
The report also looks at direct responses and public reactions to those tweets, as found
respectively on the comment thread at @realdonaldtrump and in random samples (N = 2500) of
US computer-based tweets containing the term on the days in that time period of his most
retweeted “Fake News” tweets. Along with the high percentage of retweets built into this search,
the sample exhibits techniques and patterns of response which are identified and illustrated.
The main findings:
● The term “fake news” emerged in public usage in October 2016 to describe hoaxes,
rumors, and false alarms, primarily in connection with the Trump-Clinton presidential
contest and its electoral result.
● President-elect Trump adopted the term, intensified it into “Fake News,” and directed it
at “Fake News Media” starting in December 2016-January 2017.
2
● Subsequently, the term has been used on Twitter largely in relation to Trump tweets that
deploy it. In other words, “Fake News” rarely appears on Twitter referring to something
other than what Trump is tweeting about.
● Trump’s primary purpose in using the term has been to cast doubt on news media
organizations and reporting as “Fake News.” Of the top twenty-five retweeted Trump
“Fake News” tweets between January 2017 and August 2018, only four referred to policy
issues (immigration, North Korea). Another four concerned Trump, Putin, and the
investigation into ties between them and their associates.
● In attacking the Fake News Media as a dishonest institution that has become “an enemy
of the [American] people,” Trump has relied on eight tactics: demonization, division,
blurring, distortion, diversion, self-glorification, intemperate language, and reversal.
● Many tweeters have responded in a tone similar to Trump’s aggressive and personal
style. Fact-check assertions (i.e. this is true and this is not) have been common, and
sometimes come with purportedly documentary links. Reality-check statements
attempting to remind readers about, and shift a conversation to, other public affairs
topics have been rare.
● Communications practices evident in tweets about Fake News have generally exhibited
a lack of self-governance in both the micro interpersonal and macro democratic politics
senses of that word.
3
Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people,
the fake news.
And just remember: What you're seeing and what you're reading is not
what's happening.
--President Donald J. Trump, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars national
convention, Kansas City MO, July 24, 2018.
I. “Fake News!” and fake news.
In the first nineteen months of his presidency, from Inauguration Day in 2017 through the
end of August 2018, Donald Trump tweeted the term “Fake News” or “Fake News Media” 291
times. That’s about 7% of the total tweets he issued (4,091) via @realdonaldtrump, his primary
and personal Twitter outlet. By comparison, “MAGA” (78) or “Make America Great Again” (79)
appeared 157 times, “Witch Hunt” 124, “No Collusion” 50, and “Enemy of the People” 9 times,
each time coupled with Fake News in the post.
1
In the same time period President Trump
tweeted “Fox,” as in Fox News and especially the program “Fox and Friends,” 170 times.
Donald Trump, of course, is the world’s leading emitter of political tweets. He’s not the
most followed political tweeter (Barack Obama has more), but that says more about the limited
value of the follower metric than the state of political Twitter. Behold the amplifying power of
Trump’s repeating a phrase: during the same time period he tweeted “Fake News” 291 times,
that two-word epithet appeared in 24,981,671 Twitter posts originating in the United States,
according to data collected by the monitoring and analytics company Crimson Hexagon. In other
words, on Twitter people (and bots) echoed Trump’s term approximately 100,000 times for each
time he used it. That’s not necessarily in direct response to his usages, but given the
presidential provenance and thrust of the term, it’s a fair ratio to invoke. By comparison, #metoo
surfaced in 4,612,100 posts from October 15, 2017, the day it took off, until the end of August
2018; in that same time span there were more than twice as many “fake news” tweets:
11,126,556.
My central argument in this report is that the president has deployed and hyped the
phrase “Fake News” mainly in order to get people to think that the news media deliberately
distribute a lot of information about him that they know not to be true, as part of a concerted
effort to undermine his presidency.
2
As we will see, the reverse is closer to the truth: Trump has
1
Statistics compiled via the invaluable TrumpTwitterArchive.com, checked March 6, 2019. By that date
the percentage of Trump tweets with “Fake News” had dipped slightly to 6%: 366 out of 5,790.
2
Unfortunately, the analytic platforms do not reliably differentiate between “fake news” in lower case and
“Fake News” with caps, “FAKE NEWS” all upper case, and “FAKE NEWS!” with an exclamation point.
4
relied on a set of tactics to discredit the media (excepting Fox) and propagate verifiably flawed
renditions of reality. In other words, Trump has disseminated fake news under the guise of
railing at “FAKE NEWS!”
Along with identifying his tactics, this report describes how people have reacted to Fake
News tweets in their comments. The reactors include news media figures, as one would expect.
To start, I review how Trump developed “Fake News” as a propaganda term. (From here
on I will dispense with the all-caps and exclamation points, except in direct quotes).
The emergence of “fake news.”
Fake news names a social phenomenon: information that appears in news forms and
outlets but lacks verified correspondence to an actual statement or observed occurrence. It
strikes people as news but has not been vetted through a journalism process of fact-checking
and editing. Fake news sometimes has a political purpose behind it, such that it may be
additionally classified as a type of propaganda and disinformation. But that may not be the only
or primary motivation.
3
The term “fake news” entered the public vernacular just before the 2016 election, when
journalist Craig Silverman and researcher Laurence Alexander published a report on the online
news site Buzzfeed in which they identified more than 140 pro-Trump websites being run from
Veles, a town of 40,000 in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
4
One post from one of
these sites assured readers that Hillary Clinton would be indicted in 2017 for crimes relating to
her email server. Another had Clinton saying in 2013 that she wanted people like Donald Trump
to run for office because they were honest and could not be bought. The Macedonians adapted
these fake news stories from what they read on US right-wing websites. Every time a Facebook
user in the US clicked on one of them, they made money, because Facebook reaped and
shared ad revenues from customers seeking to be seen by Trump supporters.
3
For a useful taxonomy see Claire Wardle and Hossain Derakhshan, “Information Disorder: Toward an
interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking,” Council of Europe Report September 27,
2017.
Nathaniel Persily’s analytic distinctions are also worth consulting: “In evaluating which types of fake news
may have electoral impact, though, it may be helpful to differentiate between fake news as satire, fake
news for profit, political propaganda, and reckless reporting…. Propaganda can overlap with satire, profit-
seeking fake news, and conspiracy theories, but it involves much more: It is the deliberate use of
misinformation to influence attitudes on an issue or toward a candidate. Fake news as propaganda can
originate from any node on the diffuse party network and campaign organization described above. It can
come from official campaign organs, unofficially allied interest groups, friendly media organizations and
websites, foreign actors, or even the candidate himself.” From “Can Democracy Survive the Internet,” 28
Journal of Democracy 63 (2017).
4
Craig Silverman and Laurence Alexander, “How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters
With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016.
5
Silverman followed that report with a bigger story: “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake
Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook.” To be precise, as the
subheadline put it, fake news stories garnered “more total engagement on Facebook than top
election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” Silverman tabulated shares, reactions,
and comments of the top twenty election story performers originating on “hoax sites and
hyperpartisan blogs” and the nineteen online sites for established news outlets for the three
months just prior to the election; the tally was fake 8,711,000, real 7,367,000. All but three of the
fake top twenty were pro-Trump or anti-Clinton. Two of the top ten, cited above, appeared on
Facebook via Macedonia. The most recirculated and mentioned story claimed the Pope
endorsed Trump for election.
This story appeared on November 16, 2016, a week after Trump won in a shocking
upset. Contemporaneous readers, including journalists, Democratic activists, political
professionals, and Clinton herself, could have been forgiven for concluding that enough
American voters had been duped by fake news to have swung the election.
5
As Walter
Lippmann pointed out nearly a century ago, people tend to link simultaneous news events in
their minds as causally related.
6
However, definitive analysis by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris,
and Hal Roberts, while acknowledging the possibility of swung votes, concludes the effect was
minor.
7
Indeed, in the final paragraph of Silverman’s report he scrupulously noted that
“Facebook engagement did not necessarily translate into traffic.” In other words, Silverman’s
Facebook data --like the Twitter data in this report-- measured user activity, not visibility to
users.
At any rate, fake news was now an issue, a topic for discussion and study, and one
implicating social media in particular. While fake news has multiple long roots in individual
mischief, social psychology, political conflict, media economics, communications technology,
diplomatic maneuver and information warfare, the digital grid which makes Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube and so forth ubiquitous delivery systems for information adds new and distinctive
qualities to what used to be known chiefly as hoaxes. As the Silverman examples illustrate,
social media monetize, decentralize, globalize, automate, and disguise fake news in new ways.
It looks like real news on real news outlets. Social media presentations add to the believability of
fake news and motivate viewers to spread it and become an agent of what can be seen to be a
5
In her post-election book What Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017) Hillary Clinton
devoted a chapter to “Trolls, Bots, Fake News, and Real Russians.” As the chapter title suggests, Clinton
puts fake news in the context of her acrimonious relationship with Vladimir Putin and other instances of
disinformation. She does not claim fake news alone made the difference in the election. Instead she flags
it as a concern for the public policy agenda.
6
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922).
7
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018). They write that “the political effects of clickbait factories...are external
costs imposed on democracy as a side effect of the [Facebook & other social media] business model of
matching advertising dollars to clicks” by human users acting according to system one decision-making.”
(280) They characterize fake news as a “grandchild of the tabloid headline.” (286) But their data show
that user/citizen/voter exposure to online fake news was tiny.
6
“trending topic.” Online fake news also persists in public through archiving and bot activity.
Matthew Hindman and Vlad Barash found that of the “more than 6.6 million tweets linking to
fake and conspiracy news or outlets published in the month before the election,” 80% of the
accounts that generated them were still operating in spring 2018, despite the concerted and
well-publicized efforts of Twitter to remove them.
8
What is now called fake news has been dropped from the skies during war and has
adorned supermarket checkout lines for decades.
9
Fake news waxes in influence to the extent it
caters to sensational pleasures and ardent dreams. It bubbles up from rumors. People tend to
think fake news fools a lot of people other than themselves. They --we-- have been right and
wrong about that.
10
Enter Trump as president-elect.
The emergence of “FAKE NEWS!”
On December 8 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she mentioned "the
epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past
year." Two days later, Donald Trump posted his first tweet with the term:
Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during
my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue - FAKE
NEWS!
Ten days before the 2017 inauguration CNN and Buzzfeed reported that intelligence officials
briefed the president-elect about a document alleging that the Russian government possessed
“compromising” information about him. He tweeted:
FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
8
“Disinformation, ‘Fake News,’ and Influence Campaigns on Twitter,” Knight Foundation Report, October
4, 2018.
9
Media columnist Jim Rutenberg argued that the National Enquirer was a more effective fake news
conduit regarding the 2016 election than Facebook. Its publisher, David Pecker, became embroiled in the
Russian involvement scandal. “More Powerful Than a Russian Troll Army: The National Enquirer,” New
York Times, December 16, 2018.
10
On the diffusion of “true and false news” online (the authors consciously avoid the word “fake”), see S.
Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,” Science 359, 1146-1151
(2018). Sixteen social scientists outlined a multinational program for research into “The science of fake
news” in the same issue, 1094-1096. Historical essays and public opinion research about “The Anatomy
of Fake News” may be found in a forthcoming volume from LSU Press.
7
The next day at a press conference Trump refused to allow CNN’s Jim Acosta to ask a
question, saying “Your organization is terrible” and “You are fake news.” He called the leak of
the document “a disgrace...something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”
11
The anti-Fake News campaign was on. CNN was the principal target of the president-
elect’s ire that day and would remain so. The temper trigger was a leak, something most
presidents decry and attempt to curb. Trump soon abandoned the forum of a press conference
and became the first president to rely heavily on Twitter for public communication. A table with
the texts of his twenty-five most retweeted “Fake News” tweets and a time series graph showing
the frequency of the words “Fake News” on Twitter in English from US based accounts may be
found in the Appendix. These are two overlapping but not identical swathes of tweets.
II. Three “Fake News” Events, as Relayed on Twitter.
Like all media channels, Twitter collapses context. It shrinks the ambient information in
which we can comprehend a message, although it also vastly increases certain kinds of
available information to help us understand, should we choose to break away from a thread or
feed and head into the rest of the web. With respect to campaign communications and
persuasion generally we may conceptualize the helpful contextual information available to us in
five categories: personal, procedural, situational, ideological, and linguistic. Personal denotes
biographical information about key figures; procedural, an institution or organization where
decision-making occurs; situational, the here and now shared by decision-makers and
constituents; ideological, the complex of preferred means and ends which help crystallize issues
and controversies; and linguistic, words and phrases loaded with special meaning for a
community or shared jurisdiction.
Twitter also shrinks our sense of the people a message reaches, not just because they
are not in the room with us but because they may share our messages with others without our
knowing much more than the number of times it has been shared, an organizing piece of
evidence for this report.
12
Political professionals may target, test and poll social media
audiences to learn how well a message plays in Peoria (the inspiration for the name of this
project). Leaders may speak to imagined audiences; FDR conducted his radio talks as though
seated by a fireside in upstate New York. Increasingly, digital media themselves permit analysis
of audience feedback on the same channel starting in virtually no time at all. But audience
researchers are still, for all of Twitter’s ease and ubiquity of use, in a mysterious communicative
11
Rebecca Savransky, “Trump berates CNN reporter: ‘You are Fake News,’” The Hill, January 11, 2017.
12
The collapse of multiple audiences (not perspectives or considerations) is what the authors of the
phrase had in mind. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter
users, context collapse, and the imagined audience,” New Media & Society 13(1) 114–133 (2010).
Another metric gauges the aggregate number of people who see retweets, but that falls beyond this
report’s analysis.
8
situation. The channel has been in existence only since 2006. Trump is the first president to use
it in earnest.
The two-dimensional shrinking of what can be tacitly understood about tweets (by types
of rhetorical considerations and by audience responses), along with their rapid-fire, multiple-
origin, post-at-any-time, uniform look qualities, makes for a new kind of political event as
constructed and experienced. An event on Twitter consists of a spike in tweeting, a viral flurry, a
wide distribution of a trending topic. It may correspond to an event staged for the press to cover
(like a news conference or rally), or it may not. And it may relay in its rapid-fire pointillistic
fashion a factual picture of reality, or it may be faked.
To get a flavor of this, and as a first cut at what Trump has been up to with his “Fake
News” tweeting, here are contextually enhanced accounts and excerpts of tweets associated
with the three one or two-day periods within the seventeen-month time band under study when
“Fake News” was most mentioned on Twitter. Two of these three Twitter spike events also
ranked in the top twenty-five most retweeted @realDonaldTrump tweets; a sign, again, of how
much the president dominates the use of the phrase on the medium. When he tweets Fake
News, lots of people retweet him and otherwise mention or refer to his tweets.
The spikes correspond to a tumultuous presidential press conference held after the
departure of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in February 2017, an internally corrected
and Trump-castigated reporting error by CNN in June 2017, and a classic pseudo-event (that is,
an event staged solely for the purpose of making media organizations treat it news) called the
“Fake News Awards,” which was broached in November 2017 and promoted and announced in
Janaruy 2018.
The Top Spike: Trump’s First and Only Solo White House Press Conference of 2017.
The second-most retweeted post of the President Trump Fake News tweet set originated
on February 17, 2017, the day after a Trump press conference was judged by the Washington
Post to contain fifteen departures from the facts.
13
(It appears as Tweet #2 in the table.) This
televised showdown also sparked the largest Fake News onrush in U.S.-based Twitter to date,
nearly half a million posts in a three-day span. (This is represented by the “towers” on the left-
hand side of the bar chart.)
Trump had just accepted a resignation letter from National Security Advisor Michael
Flynn. News was cresting about ties between members of the inner circle of Trump’s election
campaign and Russian intelligence agents. A New York Times editorial that morning called for a
special prosecutor to investigate. A scandal “-gate” was swinging open.
13
Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Fact-Checking President Trump’s News Conference,”
Washington Post, February 16, 2017.
9
In the tweet the new president went beyond “Fake News” and invoked a phrase with
authoritarian and even totalitarian provenance:
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS,
@CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!”
In response, Twitter users linked frequently to news media commentators. Especially popular
was an embedded video clip in which Shepard Smith of Fox News turned to the camera
(knowing the president watches Fox) to express solidarity with Acosta; the president, Smith
declared, should have answered Acosta’s question about the Russia ties at the news
conference. (The embedded clip had 4.6 million views as of August 15, 2018.) The subtext, of
course, was that even a Fox reporter objected to Trump’s behavior. On the other side, activist
Michael Nöthem exhorted his readers to tweet if they agreed that Smith should depart Fox
News and that the Fake News Media is the enemy of the American people.
Trump did not hold another news conference that year; in 2018 he met with reporters in
a solo session twice, both times away from the White House and Washington D.C.
On February 18, with retweet and especially mention traffic still at a peak, derision
permeated user reactions to Trump’s tweeted assertion that:
“Don’t believe the main stream (fake news) media. The White House
is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in the process of
fixing it.”
The defensiveness of the tweet spurred commenters to bring up numerous White House
gaffes uttered since the term began a month earlier: a mythical (if not fake) massacre in Bowling
Green Ohio referenced by presidential communications lieutenant Kellyanne Conway, a Trump
remark at a rally about terrorism in Sweden (which he would modify and later claim vindication
for), and Trump mistakenly placing the 2016 Orlando mass shooting in Atlanta. Among the
president’s defenders animus was directed at CNN’s Don Lemon for cutting off a pro-Trump
guest,
The bridging theme: presidential communications were contentious and sloppy and
obfuscatory, and this was of intense interest for being early in the presidency, and as such a
potential augury of how the rest of the term would fare.
Spike Two: CNN Makes (and Corrects) a Mistake
A second Fake News spike on general US Twitter occurred around June 27 2017 –the
one-day high of the post-inaugural period under review, at 208,645 mentions– and the following
day. It revolved around the resignations of three CNN investigative reporters who published a
story that ran briefly on the CNN website. Trump entourage member Anthony Scaramucci
10
denied the account of his involvement in the Russia scandal. CNN apologized to him and he
accepted it. The story was retracted.
That first day Trump tried to broaden the incident, blowing a wrong news story into an
ominous Fake News Media force:
“Wow, CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with three
employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories
they do? FAKE NEWS!”
“So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS &
ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost?”
But “they” was CNN itself, which investigated after Scaramucci complained. Journalist
Brian J. Karem sub-tweeted (i.e. used a tweet to comment on a tweet appearing directly above
it):
“So, when we are wrong we correct ourselves but when has POTUS
ever done that? We are not FAKE news.”
Karem also told Sarah Sanders at a news conference that her use of “Fake News” was
inflammatory. Her response: “if anything has been inflamed, it’s the dishonesty that often takes place by
the news media.” A Trump supporter recapped the exchange:
“Lying MSM puts out Fake News Sarah Huckabee Sanders asks them to
be more responsible Fake News starts screaming at her.”
Karem sounded agitated but did not scream.
Users took to Twitter with fangs bared. A Trump defender dubbed CNN “#AmericanPravda” and
lauded videographer trickster James O’Keefe of Project Veritas as the “only journalist left.” Others
retweeted a video link to Fox News star Sean Hannity so people could watch him as he “SKEWERS
CNN’s ‘Fake News Chief.’” Trump opponents seized on the revelation in a Washington Post article that
he hung vanity facsimiles of himself appearing on the cover of Time magazine in his resort property
buildings. Trump tweeted a threat to the newspaper’s owner, calling for “AmazonWashingtonPost” to pay
internet sales taxes.
This was a remarkably insider event to attract such high tweet volume from outside
the presidency-press relationship.
Spike Three: The “Fake News Awards”
11
The third and rightward-most volume skyline on the “Fake News” on Twitter frequency
time-series graph stretches from late November 20, 2017 until mid-January 2018. It
corresponds to Trump’s teasers for and delivery of the “Fake News Awards.” No trophies were
awarded, as promised at the outset; however, some Twitter reactions included photoshopped
trophies. No ceremony took place; the awards were announced on a blog post at gop.com, nine
days after the promised date and one hour after the website was fixed. The awards went to
journalists (and academic/columnist Paul Krugman) for lapses and errors that were corrected
and in some cases (such as the aforementioned CNN flub) cost reporters their jobs. The last
“award” referenced no media organization, consisting instead of a blanket denial of “Russia
Collusion!”
These were, in essence, fake awards. Yet many media outlets covered it. “Easy to mock
but difficult to ignore,” as a report in the “failing” New York Times put it.
14
And many people
tweeted about it under the Fake News rubric. From Trump supporters enough would-be
nominations surfaced to suggest that the White House missed an opportunity by not soliciting
them. “They’ll never report the awards,” predicted one tweeter in early January. From the
mockers, conservative editor and podcaster Ben Shapiro wrote “The winner of the Fake News
Award is the Fake News Award.” Both Arizona Senators weighed in with graver criticisms; a
retweeted excerpt from a Jeff Flake floor speech quote pointed out that journalists risk their lives
on the job “and this effort to dismiss their work is an affront to their commitment and sacrifice.”
Amid the swarm of air quotes appeared this post from self-identified “Resister”
nickiknowsnada:
“Puerto Ricans still suffering is not fake news. CHIP families
are not fake news. Nuclear threats are not fake news. GOP Tax Scam is
not fake news. Trump-Russia is not fake news. 45 & family using the
presidency for Trump business profit is not fake news.”
Summary
In only one of the three most talked-about instances of a Trump Fake News outcry was
fake news as a social phenomenon (ie that people had been misled into taking information
wrongly called news as verifiable news) even a possibility, and in that one the incorrect news
was removed along with those making the error. In the other two cases, as Shapiro observed,
Trump was doing the faking, first lying and demonizing during the press conference and then
ballyhooing an awards show that turned out to be merely a news release.
14
Matt Flegenheimer and Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Hands Out ‘Fake News Awards’, Sans The Red
Carpet, “ The New York Times, January 17, 2018. The photo above the print edition of this news article
showed a big billboard in Times Square featuring talk-show host Stephen Colbert dressed to resemble
Edward R. Murrow, posed pensively before an old microphone. The billboard offered to Trump “for your
consideration” a nomination for “The Most Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards of the Year.”
12
To judge from these three examples, the heavy traffic for “Fake News” tweets stemmed
from the compound product of Donald Trump’s unusual talent for publicity, multiplied by the
perennially heavy public interest in the presidency, multiplied again by media people’s penchant
to talk about themselves. (There is no shinier object that wins media attention more than a
mirror.)
In only 8 of the 25 most retweeted Trump Fake News tweets were there references or
allusions to real-world lower case fake news or to news pertaining to policy issues. The
prevailing context on the @realdonaldtrump threads and the US-based twitterdom was the
celebrity-studded conflict between the president and the news media he categorically deemed
dishonest. Tweeters behaved as fans, internalizing the dramatic exchanges they saw at the
forsaken forum of the White House news conference and in spike/events on social media.
By the time of the Fake News Awards a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey reported that
56% of respondents to a multiple-choice question classified fake news (lower case, no quotation
marks) as a “very serious threat to democracy,” the most severe option provided.
15
The jousting
and jeering had generated concern among the general populace.
III. How Trump Has Promulgated “Fake News.”
This section illustrates communication techniques Trump has deployed while tweeting
about “Fake News,” and how other tweeters have responded to them. The techniques are:
1. Demonization: The Media Mean Harm.
2. Division: It’s Us versus Them.
3. Blurring: Vague References and Unsupported Assertions.
4. Distortion: False, Exaggerated and Misleading Claims.
5. Distraction and Diversion: “Don’t Look at That, Look at This.”
6. Self-Glorification: My Efforts for You are Historic and Heroic.
7. Bad Behavior: Intemperate Language.
8. Deflection by Reversal: It’s Them, not Me.
1. Demonization: The Media Mean Harm.
The gateway tactic is Trump’s accusation that the media publish fake news
deliberately. While he has singled out several journalists and organizations, the ascription of
bad motives applies indiscriminately, in keeping with the common treatment of “the media”
as a coherent institution instead of a competitive industry that uses (and sometimes even
pays) guests from other walks of life.
15
“American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy,” Knight Foundation Report published January 15,
2018.
13
Trump has expounded his accusation in terms of standard journalistic practices.
January 13, 2018:
“So much Fake News is being reported. They don’t even try to
get it right, or correct it when they are wrong.”
As the incidents discussed in the previous section demonstrate, this was not so. The trigger
for this tweet was the publication of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, as its second,
motive-imputing part makes clear:
“They promote the Fake Book of a mentally deranged author, who
knowingly writes false information. The Mainstream Media is
crazed that WE won the election.”
Two of the top twenty respondents to this post noted an irony: the same morning that Trump
railed against Fake News about himself and brought up his election fourteen months earlier,
the president was silent regarding a real-time dangerous instance of fake news resulting
from a miscommunication by a government authority. Joshua Dysart:
“This was Trump’s first tweet three hours after Hawaii’s false
missile alarm terrified the entire island. Never once did he
use Twitter to help assuage the situation. No one this self-
involved should be a leader of anyone but themselves.”
Two weeks earlier Trump suggested he regarded his role as media critic as an
unpleasant burden to be borne:
“I use Social Media not because I like to, but because it is
the only way to fight a VERY dishonest and unfair ‘press,’ now
often referred to as Fake News Media. Phony and non-existent
‘sources’ are being used more often than ever. Many stories
and reports a pure fiction.”
What set Trump off that day was news about his former campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos had pled guilty to perpetrating fake news: in particular, to
giving false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential
campaign. He would serve time in federal prison for this crime. The news on December 30 was
that Papadopoulos, while drinking at a bar in London in May 2016, let Alexander Downer,
Australia’s top diplomat in Britain, know that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. After that
dirt surfaced months later on Wikileaks, Australian officials passed the information about Mr.
14
Papadopoulos to American counterparts, which in turn spurred the F.B.I. to launch its
counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign that July.
16
None of these details are evident or even alluded to in the tweet. Instead, Trump
transitions from the word “press” (in skeptic’s quotes) to the “now often referred to as Fake
News Media.” This insinuates that many people have adopted Trump’s appellation. It is a self-
serving and self-obscuring generalization, and it smears journalism wide and deep.
In response on Twitter some did indeed refer to the Fake News Media. In dissent, Aaron
Gouveia, posting under the handle @DaddyFiles as “a proud husband, father of three boys (7,
2, and 5 months), and director at a Boston PR firm currently living in southeastern
Massachusetts,” tried humor and high dudgeon in pushing back:
“First of all, you LOVE social media because you’re an attention
crazed drama queen. Second, only you and your army of
undereducated miscreants call the press ‘fake news’ in earnest.
Third, you lie more than any 100 people picked at random. Lastly,
shut the hell up.”
This was not specific regarding the convicted liar and the origins of the Russian investigation,
either.
After the Charlottesville tragedy Trump complained not just of unfair treatment but
malevolence as well:
“Made additional remarks on C’ville and realize once again that
the #FakeNewsMedia will never be satisfied,..truly bad people!”
By May 2018 Trump was ascribing bad intentions by adverb [emphasis added]:
“Fake News Media had me calling immigrants, or illegal
immigrants, “Animals.” Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to
withdraw their stories. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,”
a big difference - and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as
usual.”
Trump inflamed a genuine gotcha with bearing on a big issue into an institutional indictment of
malevolence.
2. Division: It’s Us versus Them.
16
Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign
Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” New York Times, December 30, 2017.
15
Conceivably, demons work their mischief on everyone and Trump could be battling
against them on behalf of the entire nation and world, but that’s where technique number two
comes into play. Trump puts the Fake News Media into the opposition and enemy camps, a
distinction which reflects Trump’s intensification and promotion of a partisan and polarized
America. In this rendering, Trump and the American People (“We”) are real, while Fake News
Media and Democrats (“They”) are allied against them. He depicts himself not as the president
of all the people, but as “your president” or “your favorite president.” He does not mention
Republicans as part of the “we” as often, a tacit acknowledgement perhaps of the continuing rift
within the party between his supporters and opponents, or a blurring to isolate Democrats as
fringe.
Primary contests and special elections supplied a handy pretext for sowing division. This
tweet surfaced on June 20, 2017 right after Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon
Ossoff in GA 08:
“Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to Make
America Great Again are 5 and 0. All the Fake News, all the money
spent = 0.”
The top three comments came from @deepstate expose, the Twitter address of Jeremy Stone,
whose self-published book “History of the Deep State Exposed” can be purchased on Amazon.
Hard to tell if a real person. His comments consist of three photoshopped graphics: Trump
drinking from a coffee mug labeled “CNN Tears,” Chelsea Clinton holding up a license plate
reading “Hillary for Prison 2017,” and Elizabeth Warren, her thumb and forefinger gesturing a
little bit, captioned “This is how much I know about economics.” This triptych was followed on
the comment string by counter-photoshops, a few cuss words, and even a policy reference:
David Lazarus: “Way to heal the nation’s wounds, bro.”
Genesis 1:1: “And just what are you doing to improve things??????
David Lazarus:“I’d strengthen the mandate to stabilize and lower
premiums.”
A little over a year later, on August 8, 2018, after Troy Balderson had apparently retained an
Ohio House seat for the Republican party (the victory would be confirmed three weeks later
after absentee and provisional ballots were tabulated), Trump took the occasion to complain
about Fake News Media bias :
“The Republicans have now won 8 out of 9 House seats, yet if you
listen to the Fake News Media you would think we are being
clobbered. Why can’t they play it straight, so unfair to the
Republican Party and in particular your favorite President!”
16
In lining up on partisan sides, none of the tweets examined questioned the assumption
that the media were apart from that division. Indeed, replies to the June 2017 Handel-Ossoff
election tweet matched Trump’s enemy-level animus; they steamed with vitriolic calls of
impeachment for Trump and incarceration for Hillary Clinton. By summer 2018 this had calmed
slightly; the exchanges consisted mainly of cartoon and cartoon-comment skirmishing and
partisan analysis of the election data. Instead of Clinton, the oppositional face belonged to
Obama.
When the context shifted to a Trump scandal, the divisiveness sometimes took on a
different emphasis, with Democrats as the perpetrators of fake news and Fake News Media
abetting. December 12 2017:
“Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars
spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with
Russia - so now they are moving on to the false accusations and
fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never
met. FAKE NEWS!”
In this instance, the supposedly partisan-driven accusations against Trump actually originated
on the Megyn Kelly Show the day before, with Trump’s famous interlocutor having moved from
Fox to NBC. The program, broadcast at the height of the #MeToo scandals, aired sexual
misconduct allegations from three women, who called for a Congressional investigation. There
was a partisan dimension, in that the Roy Moore-Doug Jones contest to fill an Alabama Senate
seat occurred that day, and Moore’s pedophilia was a main theme in that race. And there was
another fake news angle as well, in that ABC had just suspended Brian Ross over a Russian
investigation story. So the jumbling together of the three stories in a partisan frame made some
sense.
Tweeted comments embraced the divisive theme. Sharp exchanges between White
House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and several journalists were marbled into reactions to
the sexual misconduct charges. A sprinkling of retweets of a Washington Post story by Ashley
Parker slightly raised the salience of the fact that “the idea that he does not know or has not met
any of the women who have accused him of sexual misbehavior — as he claimed in his tweet
Tuesday — is simply false.”
17
3. Blurring: Vague References and Unsupported Assertions.
Tweets about Fake News can, abetted by their uniformity, terseness, and scrollability,
mask their lack of verification in weasel words. Here is a much-retweeted Trump missive from
July 1, 2017:
17
Ashley Parker, “Trump seeks to dismiss sexual harassment allegations as 'fake news',” Washington
Post, December 12, 2017.
17
“I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed
as #fakenews and garbage journalism. It’s about time!”
The adverb “finally” and the proclamation “It’s about time” suggest a definitive judgement after a
long period of investigation. Trump’s “extreme pleasure” evokes the emotions of a triumphant
courtroom verdict.
What was this about? Hard to determine by restoring the context of the news day. It
could have been referring to CNN having relied on a fake National Enquirer headline in a
segment, or a James O’Keefe gotcha secret recording of a CNN producer disparaging voters.
Perhaps the president was harkening back to the June 27 firings of three CNN reporters, the
third big spike analyzed in the previous section of this report.
Direct responses to a blurred post consisted in part of quasi-religious praise. Ernest
Pearson of Goose Creek SC, a “Christian warrior --corporal in the Light Brigade --Special Ops
Division,” told Trump “Don’t listen to the haters, many more of us love you than the minority of
haters!” He kept pledging love and faith in the mode of his self-description as others criticized
Trump’s “fake leadership.”
Blurring deepens when a tweet refers to multiple incidents, doubly so when there are
multiple actors involved. For instance, this Trump post from early on October 4, 2017 railed:
“Wow, so many Fake News stories today. No matter what I do or
say, they will not write or speak truth. The Fake News Media is
out of control!”
The actors and acts are indeterminate; all a reader knows is that Trump, once again, has
been wronged. This could have been in reference to Rex Tillerson, who was *not* leaving the
State Department as reported in places. And/or word that Jared and Ivanka had been close to
being charged with felony fraud in 2012. And/or a walked-back promise by the president to zero
out Puerto Rico’s debt. The tweet makes plain only the bad motives of the sinister force on
the opposing or enemy side.
When facing a blur a proximate news account can serve as a clarifying lens. The top-
displayed responses to this tweet in the @realdonaldtrump stream when I checked it in the fall
of 2018 consisted of a tweetstorm from Jack Schofield, a London based “Tech journo who
covered IT for the Guardian (1983-2010),” and had 43K plus followers. Schofield anchored his
first tweet to a story by Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale. According to Schofield, Dale had
been blocked from Trump’s feed presumably for having published an eyewitness and otherwise
well-documented account of the president’s visit the day before to Puerto Rico, during which he
18
tossed rolls of paper towels to an audience and claimed that only 16 persons had perished from
Hurricane Maria.
18
Schofield did not stop there. His second tweet featured a screenshot of a story about a
CNN poll finding more Americans trusted the network than the president. Number #3 linked to a
BBC clip about how dictators demonize the media. Number #4: a screen shot of an unsourced
article in which Trump referred to in blue highlight here as “mentally limited” which Schofield
echoed and modified as MENTALLY WEAK in his cover tweet. Number #5: a screen shot from
a Schofield search for articles with the keywords “Trump” and “Mental.” #6 and last, another
unsourceable clip from an article describing Trump as “the Muscovian Candidate,” an allusion to
the Manchurian Candidate.
The journalist was documenting how crazy Trump was making him. Keith Olbermann,
the sports anchor who has made a career out of calibrated outrage, tweeted in a similar mode:
“Is this about Rex calling you a moron? Or about a bribe saving
Jr and Ivanka from being indicted? Or Mueller linking Facebook to
WI/MI? Or”
The abrupt cutoff could have been an allusion to the final episode of The Sopranos. Or
4. Distortion: False, Exaggerated and Misleading Claims.
Trump rose to political prominence by peddling fake news already in circulation. His
birther tweet of August 6 2012 read:
“An extremely credible source has called my office and told me
that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud.”
This is an old trick where the falsehood comes wrapped as an attribution to an anonymous
informant. It seemed false to many, but Obama did not put the matter to serious rest until he
released his long-form birth certificate was not publicly refuted until 2011, and even then, as
the tweet indicates, the calumny persisted. Trump had aired the charge as early as 2011.
He retreated from it in the fall of 2016 while the Republican nominee, his statement
ensconced in credit-claiming and a false shot at his opponent, claiming Hillary Clinton had
begun the controversy.
19
18
Daniel Dale, “In bizarre visit, Donald Trump compares Puerto Rico to ‘a real catastrophe like Katrina’ —
and congratulates himself: Analysis,” Toronto Star, October 3, 2017.
19
For a thorough view of the controversy, including disputations of fact and interpretation, see the
Wikipedia entry “Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories.”
19
Since his election Donald Trump has passed off and presided over factually wrong
claims under cover of the upper case Fake News charge. The wildly inflated crowd count at
his inauguration, voiced originally by Sean Spicer, exemplifies how some President Trump
distortions have been so immediately and blatantly at odds with evident facts as to transport
the public square into the vertiginous territory of contradiction we associate with the works
of Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and the Marx Brothers.
20
The fifth most retweeted Trump
tweet from the time period, sent August 26, 2018, read:
“Over 90% approval rating for your all time favorite (I hope)
President within the Republican Party and 52% overall. This despite
all of the made up stories by the Fake News Media trying endlessly to
make me look as bad and evil as possible. Look at the real villains
please!”
According to the Real Clear Politics aggregate, Trump’s job approval rating that day was
52.7% disapproval and 43.6% approval; Gallup’s reading was 54-41 disapproval. Yet none of
the one hundred randomly sampled posts with “Fake News” in them that day discussed the poll
numbers, much less checked them. Many were preoccupied spreading the tweet verbatim and a
Breitbart headline that Jim Sciutto, a CNN reporter, had been “busted for two fake news scoops
in one week.”
On July 19, 2018 Trump tweeted “Will the Dems and Fake News ever learn?
This is classic!” The accompanying link being teased showed a ten-second clip of Hillary
Clinton saying we want a strong Russia. Clinton promptly pointed out in a tweeted reply that she
had said that when Dmitry Medvedev was president, and appended a video in which she
condemned Putin. On his thread he fought this to a draw in responses. But several commenters
noted that the icon in the top right of the clip belongs to Russia Today, a propaganda arm of the
Kremlin. The historical context for the thread involved Clinton having criticized Putin while
Secretary of State, Putin retaliating during the 2016 election campaign, and then Trump, whose
ties to Putin remain under investigation, took advantage.
The press has responded to distortion institutionally through the format of fact-checking
columns, in which a story is devoted to investigating a political leader’s claim and often
awarding it a rating for truthfulness. The Poynter Institute launched an International Fact-
Checking Network in 2015. Toronto Star DC bureau chief Daniel Dale maintains a publicly
searchable database of false claims made by President Trump; the contents topped 4,500
entries as of March 24, 2019. A comparable database compiled by the Washington Post had
more than double that on the same day, 9,179.
The wide disparity does not exonerate Trump, but it demonstrates that fact-checking has
limits. Statistical facts can be checked to the point of presenting clerical inaccuracies, as above,
but not to resolving genuine discrepancies among polls or differences of opinion within.
20
The epigraph to this report evokes the line spoken by Chico in Duck Soup while impersonating
Groucho: “Who Ya Gonna Believe, Me or Your Own Eyes?”
20
Sentences with past tense verbs can be checked through documentary records; but sentences
about the present and future cannot. Wikipedia can make incomplete, unverified, and disputed
claims evident; journalism, for the most part, does not. Political journalism relies on methods of
extracting information from individuals (interviews, primarily) which take time: to find the right
people to talk with, to win sufficient trust for them to talk, and to set the resulting words against
what has been previously documented and what other sources say.
Twitter, like ordinary conversation, has no such method.
5. Distraction and Diversion: “Don’t Look at That, Look at This.”
Twitter, like other Big Tech platforms, continuously serves up distracting information by
design. Mesmerization keeps people on the site.
21
Counters change the numbers of likes and
retweets for the handful of tweets on the screen, and when a post is going viral the changes
look like spinning slot machine components. When the counters are not moving, the user can
scroll to check more of one’s amalgamated dynamic news feed.
Trump, similarly, veers from one sensational topic (sex, violence, celebrities, money,
win/loss scores) to another with no evident cost on Twitter to his sustaining attention and getting
news media and their audiences to shift in step with him. Tweetstorms accomplish this so well
that the fact of one has become a topic for news stories along with speculation about his mental
health.
22
For example, on January 2, 2018, President Trump tweeted a nuclear button double
entendre about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. After five days it had garnered more than
193,000 retweets and megatons of mentions in other media. It was the most-talked about of the
sixteen tweets Trump issued that day. He also expressed support for Iranian protesters, urged
the Justice Department to prosecute and “Jail!” Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and take
action on former FBI Director James Comey, took credit for the safety record of US commercial
airlines spoke about wasted US aid to Palestine and Pakistan, the retirement of Senator Orrin
Hatch, war veterans, the Border Patrol, Democrats and DACA, “companies giving big bonuses
to their workers because of the Tax Cut Bill” and more. He also promised to “announce THE
MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR” (52,000 retweets) on
January 8th at 5:00 pm eastern time.
June 21, 2018 brought a double distraction:
21
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.)
22
For example, see Derek Robertson, “The Day Trump Never Stopped Tweeting,” Politico Magazine,
December 31, 2018, a narrative account of August 29, 2018, when Trump issued twenty-two tweets. The
author attributed this prolixity to a compulsion.
21
“I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’ written on the back of Melania’s
jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how
dishonest they are and she truly no longer cares!”
Melania was visiting the U.S./Mexico border. She did not wear the jacket while visiting children
separated from her parents. Comments on Twitter sparred over a Time magazine cover which
photoshopped a crying toddler next to the president. As discussion on Twitter and elsewhere
debated the proposition that the photo was fake because the child had not been separated from
her mother, Time issued a clarification of that point. Trump, perhaps in league with his wife, had
started a second topic of concern.
Trump has engaged in the diversionary convention known as “whataboutism.” On July
14, he sought relief from the Russia scandal that has lasted longer than his presidency. It was
an especially excruciating moment; Special Counsel Robert Mueller had just indicted twelve
Russian intelligence officers and Trump’s summit with Putin lay three days ahead. The tweet
dropped the top two usual red herrings:
“These Russian individuals did their work during the Obama years.
Why didn’t Obama do something about it? Because he thought Crooked
Hillary Clinton would win, that’s why. Had nothing to do with the
Trump Administration, but Fake News doesn’t want to report the truth,
as usual!”
Supportive comments sported a meme advanced by a campaign begun in May: “#walkaway.”
The idea is to quit the Democratic Party. punish the fake news media by depriving them of
revenue. This fit with a Trump theme in previous “Fake News” tweets and another one that day,
to the effect that Fake News Media were failing financially. One read:
“CNN FAKE NEWS Gets Served. Failing Network Loses to Food Network
in Latest Ratings.”
[REVISE In this way, tweeters responded to Fake News tweets by the president
encouraged people to ignore news outlets carrying bad news about Trump. If effectuated it
would have the salutary effect of punishing those who deliberately, perniciously, erroneously,
dishonestly sought to bring him down. It was not a boycott so much as a satisfying retort.]
6. Self-Glorification: My Efforts for You are Historic and Heroic.
Trump’s obsession with his image and reputation are well known. In the context of “Fake
News!” tweets, in classic celebrity fashion, “your favorite president” solicits fan identification with
his spectacular success, cultivating admiration for his brand, and gratitude for his embrace of
their safety from foreign invaders as his utmost cause. He flashed false modesty opening a
tweet with “I use Social Media not because I like to…” (the full tweet appears
22
above in the demonization section). He expressed mock fatigue at constantly winning
(something he promised audiences at campaign rallies that they would experience) in a June
15, 2018 reflection:
“I’ve had to beat 17 very talented people including the Bush
Dynasty, then I had to beat the Clinton Dynasty, and now I have to
beat a phony Witch Hunt and all of the dishonest people covered in the
IG [Inspector General] Report...and never forget the Fake News Media.
It never ends!”
Conversely, he vented “I can’t win” frustration in this July 20 2018 plaint. It forgoes the
use of a public channel for diplomatic communications to a whine about how poorly he gets
treated when he practices diplomacy:
“I got severely criticized by the Fake News Media for being too
nice to President Putin. In the Old Days they would call it Diplomacy.
If I was loud & vicious, I would have been criticized for being too
tough. Remember when they said I was too tough with Chairman Kim?
Hypocrites!”
Opponents regarded this as damage control for a botched summit with the Russian leader, and
several brought up recent murders in an Annapolis MD newsroom to imply that Trump fostered
a dangerous social atmosphere for journalists. Supporters seemed to lend credibility to that view
by picking up the “media as enemy” refrain.
Like P.T. Barnum, Trump plays on “the desire of a democratic audience to become
involved in the show as much as they were involved in their politics.”
23
This presumed yearning
for intimate details extends, as in past presidencies, to reveals about his family. Here is an
August 2, 2018 tweet ranking just outside the top twenty-five retweeted, at thirtieth:
“They asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the
enemy of the people. She correctly said no. It is the FAKE NEWS, which
is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!”
While this received a few retweets in the random sample of one hundred “Fake News” tweets on
that day, there were no comments. Instead, the usual rhetorical sniper-fire at CNN personalities
took precedence. The same pattern exists in responses to the other tweets in this subsection.
Perhaps self-glorification elicits only silent attention from admirers even as it provokes rage from
opponents.
7. Bad Behavior: Intemperate and Immature Language.
23
Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
p.500.
23
Trump is notorious for his derisive nicknames and emotionally supercharged words.
The top retweeted tweets reflect this in words applied to the Fake News Media:
“Disgraceful.” “Disgusting.” Above all “Dishonest.”
Commenters on highly circulated intemperate “Fake News” tweets by the president
have often embraced the license to talk nasty. A favorite motif has been to post video links
of on the air confrontations and use violent verbs as both click-bait and vicarious fighting:
Watch so-and-so get “destroyed,” “whipped,” “wrecked.” These hard verbs came from
comments in a January 7, 2018 sample of reactions to a tilt between CNN’s Jake Tapper
and Administration official Stephen Miller.
While this behavior gets rationalized and excused by those sympathetic to his
political project and dependent on his supporters for votes, it may also be the case (and the
tweets support it) that it attracts those supporters in the first place, much as bad boys from
time immemorial have manifested an allure by defying rules of civility and getting away with
it.
8. Reversal: It’s Them not Me.
Reversal may be the summative tactic. It resembles the psychological concept of
projection, attributing the very qualities to others which one exhibits in the process of
attribution.
In twelve tweets in the time period Trump coupled “Fake News” with “Witch Hunt.” The
witch hunt has been allegedly conducted not just by the press and Democrats but by such
executive branch officials involved in the Russia investigation as Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, FBI Director James Comey, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann.
Andrew McCabe, and above all Special Counsel Robert Mueller. This is, in short, a witch-hunt-
by-means-of-crying “Witch Hunt!”
As a sort of a mirror imaging or double reversal, many of the comments in the sampled
tweets elicited by Trump tweets manifesting this tactic, usually in combination with others, was
to ironize (see the Ben Shapiro comment above on the Fake News Awards, a textbook
reversal), imitate, and retaliate in kind.
IV. Conclusion: Editorial Day And Beyond
An August 16, 2018 Trump tweet read:
24
“There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than
true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. The fact is that the Press is FREE to write
and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS,
pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people.
HONESTY WINS!”
This display of self-glorification, reversal, division, and demonization was sparked by the
appearance that day of more than three hundred editorials criticizing the president’s attacks on
the press. These ran in response to a call from the editorial board of the Boston Globe and the
American Society of News Editors. I am dubbing this demonstration of vocational pushback
“Editorial Day because the concerted action had no name of its own, a telling point about the
peculiarly journalistic non-campaign counter-campaign effort.
There was no campaign pledge, hashtag, or call to action. Old-school journalists don’t
do that as part of their objectivity ideology: they see their mission as describing from the stands,
not getting into the arena. However one judges the appropriateness of that ideology in today’s
public world, the effect was to tamp down the impact of the editorials. When the editorials ran
the online news aggregation site Memeorandum.com slotted the coverage and commentary in
its “Mediagazer” index instead of the main site designated for “politics, opinion, and current
events.”
In online comments veteran journalist (and able student of rhetoric) Howard Fineman
high-horsed it: “We are flawed, but we work for YOU: not feds, presidents, courts, states, police
or ANY governmental entity. Our freedom is YOUR freedom, based on the Declaration, the
Constitution and We the People. It’s as simple — as indispensably American — as that.” That
prompted several on his thread to point out that he worked, in fact, for MSNBC. The U.S.
Senate passed a resolution stating that it “affirms that the press is not the enemy of the
people;” the unanimity of the act attested to its flimsiness and amplified the phrase.
The protest met a familiar media fate of being eclipsed by a bigger story, the death of
Aretha Franklin.
All told, Editorial Day had a calvary charging against drones feel to it. Press critic Jay
Rosen told Ezra Klein on his podcast that October
24
:
“Yeah, I think we’re completely losing this battle. On every level. And fighting about truth
itself, there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of
understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.”
----
24
The Ezra Klein Show, October 18, 2018.
25
The techniques on display in Trump’s “Fake News!” campaign and the delegitimation
purpose they serve are not the sum and total of the emotions, ideas, and actions Trump has
communicated through Twitter. But because the tweets examined here and the remaining 266
in the time period were about the news media, they were writ large and amplified by the news
media, and become signature traits of Trump’s political style and purpose.
At the most basic level Trump’s seizure of “fake news” and weaponizing it into “Fake
News” was accomplished through insistent repetition from a big and omnipresent
communication platform, an offensive from a new kind of bully pulpit. But even in a short burst
medium there were details to deal with, and it is in how Trump has sought to impose his context
over others that his campaign of words has been most troubling.
His primary context –I am fighting a monster– has, through reversal, trampled other
contexts for apprehending public affairs. Presidents are presumed leaders, so Trump has
exhibited and excused in others a stomping type of tweeting. The retweets, the likes, the piling
on responses and the responses in kind from “the resistance.” all spread the meta-message that
this is how to speak of American politics today.
Findings from extending the time series to March 2019 [show that] the first helped
cement the phrase as Trump defined it in the vernacular.
What we need to stem this tide as it approaches institutionalization: 1) to promote tweets
that offer reality checks as well as fact checks in the threads of politics-media figure tussles.
Dan Rather has been on this. [In how many of the 25 did Trump specify what was fake? In how
many was the topic something other than the Trump-CNN et al battle?] 2) the equivalent of
calming humps, signals, and bollards that can serve as counter-phrases and memes. For
example: the practice of eschewing inflammatory adjectives and adverbs. Tweeting “calm down”
seems as unlikely to work on Twitter as it does in person. 3) above all, telling the truth as one
knows it.
What is at stake is the capacity for self-governance, both in the micro of conversational
life and the macro of democratic politics and governance. Timothy Snyder, a historian
specializing in twentieth century eastern and central Europe, published a best-selling pamphlet
in 2017 entitled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. Reviewing Trump’s
first year from the book’s perspective, it should be noted that two big democratic circuits have
yet to be broken: Trump has not assembled a paramilitary palace guard, and prior restraints on
publication have yet to be mounted. But Lesson Ten implores us to be vigilant believers in the
value of truth:
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise
power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is
spectacle.The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
26
Should the techniques in evidence in the Fake News tweets become normal, much less “the”
norm, in how Americans discuss public affairs, they will lose touch with the best approximations
of truths about the world, and will find it harder trust in the efforts of both the president and the
news media to present them.
“HONESTY WINS!” We’ll see.
POSTSCRIPT
In late August Trump turned his Fake News guns on Big Tech. He picked up on the anti-
conservative bias charge leveled by Republican Senators and Representatives at Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he testified before Congress in February, and widened the target
range to include Google and Twitter. This showed sharp instinct. Big Tech was under public fire
for several reasons, including of course its role in lax policing against Cambridge Analytica and
the Russian Internet Research Agency. Trump’s August 24 post rocketed to the top of the most
retweeted list:
“Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t do this
even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose
ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real,
and what is not, without censorship!
A few days later, Trump Googled himself:
“Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the
viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it
RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.
Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut
out. Illegal? 96% of…
....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very
dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and
hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we
can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”
There was no second annual Fake News Awards in early 2019.
APPENDICES:
The top 25 table.
27
The time series chart.
28
