Monday morning, Donald Trump began his work week with derisive tweets about Joe Scarborough’s ratings and the evils of fake-news networks.
“We should have a contest,” Trump proposed, “as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!”
Of all the President’s memes, fake news is the one most likely to send him to the caps-lock key. Trump’s very first tweet on the topic, according to lesser fake-news outlet USA Today, was a December 2016 takedown of CNN. Nearly a year later, the publisher of Collins Dictionary has announced that fake news (noun: false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting) is its “2017 Word of the Year,” beating out a short list of finalists that included “unicorn,” “gender-fluid,” and “fidget spinner.”
Of all the President’s memes, fake news is the one most likely to send him to the caps-lock key.
Like most memes—including Kellyanne Conway’s infamous “alternative facts”—the term “fake news” is ambiguous and therefore versatile. It can refer to reporting that’s unintentionally flawed or thinly sourced. It can mean out-and-out propaganda. Or it can simply be a euphemism for the network press pool (not including Fox).
It can also be dangerous, a point that the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett underscores in his new book, The Truth Matters: A Citizen's Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in its Tracks (Ten Speed Press, 144 pages). Bartlett sets out to provide readers with tools for seeking out factual content and context that’s currently being sacrificed to the 24-hour news cycle.
“The burden on citizens to sift fact from fiction is getting heavier,” writes Bartlett. “They can no longer just assume that the gatekeepers of credible news outlets still have the power to punish the disreputable and reward accuracy and truthfulness with honors like the Pulitzer Prize. It took many years for the old practices of ‘yellow journalism’ to be suppressed in favor of professional journalistic standards that were widely accepted."
While Bartlett’s reach surely exceeds his grasp—“stopping fake news in its tracks” is a tall order for a book that’s less than 150 pages—he does include a resource guide to useful sites that range from the the familiar Snopes, Wayback Machine and Politifact, to the lesser-known ProQuest publications database, Oxford University Press Blog, and a variety of statistical calculators. In fact, the book often reads more like an advice manual for beginning journalists.
“If it’s a government study,” he writes, “don’t just say ‘government study’; say, “According to a study published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the April 2017 issue of the Monthly Labor Review . . . .’ The goal should be to give enough information that someone could find the source relatively easily even if the link didn’t exist.”
Bartlett’s book is just one of dozens currently hitting the market that flaunt the search-engine friendly term “fake news’ in their titles. Here’s a few: Fake News and Alternative Facts. Fake News and Media Bias. Fake News in Real Context. Fake News 101. Everything You Need to Know About Fake News and Propaganda. The True Story of Fake News: How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions.
One of the most fascinating is cultural historian Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 575 pages), which traces a history of outrageous deceits and sideshow freaks from the nineteenth century showman P.T. Barnum to his twenty-first century counterpart Donald J. Trump.
Trump is in many ways similar to Barnum, writes Young, a National Book Award finalist and director of the New York Public Library’s Harlem-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Both endured and employed bankruptcies, both also ran for office (Barnum unsuccessfully); both planted fake news stories as a matter of course.”
Trump is in many ways similar to P.T. Barnum. Both endured and employed bankruptcies, both also ran for office, both planted fake news stories as a matter of course. Both were also undeniably racist.
Both were also undeniably racist. One of Barnum’s earliest freak-show curiosities was the poorly spelled “Feejee Mermaid”—which consisted of a monkey’s head and appendages stitched onto a fish’s tail. As his fortune grew, the quintessentially American showman would up the ante by recruiting real-life Fijians—and at least one African American—to dress up as “Figi Cannibals.”
One can easily imagine Barnum nodding in approval, from some unspecified afterlife, while reading Trump’s recent tweet calling LaVar Ball an “ungrateful fool” and “poor man's version of Don King.”
The two men also share an innate ability to project their own vices onto others. In the three years between his Feejee Mermaid and Figi Cannibals hoaxes, Barnum actually went to court to testify against the perpetrators of another form of trickery called “spirit photography.” He even went so far as to offer a $500 reward to anyone who could show him an image that he deemed genuinely ghostly; five years ago, Trump issued a similar challenge to Barack Obama, offering him a $5 million “reward”—he later claimed it was $50 million—if the President could prove his citizenship to Trump’s satisfaction.
“If there is little to admire in bunk like Trump’s,” Young writes. “There’s much to wonder at when you consider the collective aspect of such an unlikely endeavor. He ran a campaign and now rules by asserting his own amateurism as expertise, as well as by belittling the kinds of heroes and experts we have typically admired, from soldiers to POWs, scientists to artists, journalists to mothers.”
Ultimately, Young’s book is more poetic than prescriptive, and far from optimistic: “The half-hoax world seems in no danger of ending,” he writes, “unless it’s to give way to the complete-hoax one.”
Bartlett is more sanguine: “It’s possible that as time goes by the problem of fake news will take care of itself,” he muses. “Eventually people may learn to be more discriminating on their own, or the various technological fixes will be successful.”
In the meantime, Bartlett advises, “the best defenses against fake news are critical thinking; taking in news from a variety of sources, including those that don’t confirm your own biases.”
Bill Forman is the music and film editor of the Colorado Springs Independent and former news editor of the Sacramento News & Review.