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Go to the profile of David Podhaskie
David Podhaskie
I write for a legal newspaper. I suck without an editor.
Aug 7
America the Credulous
Why do Americans keep falling for fake news?

It feels like forever ago, but the French elections only concluded in May of last
year, with Emmanuel Macron securing a decisive victory over Marine Le Pen.
Following the success of populist campaigns around the globe — Brexit, Poland, and
Donald Trump — it was assumed by some that 2017 would be the year in which the Le
Pen family would finally put up a real fight. Indeed, just before the voting
started, a haymaker came Macron’s way, France’s own version of an “October
Surprise.” On May 5, 2017, private emails from Macron’s campaign were hacked and
subsequently released to the public. What’s worse, thanks to France’s election
laws, because the emails were released less than two days before the election,
Macron couldn’t take any action to defend himself even if he wanted to.

However, instead of a mild panic ensuing, the French people kept a cool head and
helped Macron sail to a resounding victory. The punch never landed. Surely, anyone
following the plot of this dramatic series knows this isn’t how things are supposed
to go. So, what happened?

The National Security Agency (NSA) actually determined beforehand that the French
election was vulnerable to Russian meddling. They warned the French that Russian
hackers were attempting to disrupt the political process the same way they had done
in the United States a year prior.

But this time around, despite the sophistication of the leak and its proximity to
the election, the charges didn’t stick. Why? Johan Hufnagel, the managing editor of
a left-wing paper in France put it simply: “We don’t have a Fox News in France.” To
understand the significance of his quote in the United States, you’d have to time-
travel to the 1960s, eight years before Macron was even born.

In November 1969, Vice-President Spiro Agnew attacked members of the media in a now
infamous speech, casting them as unelected elites wielding a monopoly on
information in an attempt to manipulate the American people. He criticized their
coverage of President Nixon directly, stating:

But the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the
people who elected him — and the people of this country have the right to make up
their own minds and form their own opinions about a Presidential address without
having the President’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of
hostile critics before they can even be digested.
If only President Nixon had a Twitter account. But Agnew’s primary focus wasn’t to
make a case for Nixon’s Instagram Story; his main goal was to delegitimize the
media in order to counter the allegations of corruption that encircled Nixon’s
presidency. He made repeated references to the statements of various news anchors,
in which they seemingly bemoaned their inability to remain “objective.” He used
this opportunity, and many others, to cast doubt on the credibility of the media.

In Agnew’s defense, he wasn’t the first to try this tactic. Senator Joseph McCarthy
referred to Edward R. Murrow and other journalists who were covering him as the
“jackal pack” in an attempt to cast them as overzealous and biased sycophants who
were also possibly Communist sympathizers.
History tells us that both McCarthy and Agnew ended up eating their words. McCarthy
was eventually censured by his own colleagues and Agnew resigned as Vice-President
due to mounting allegations of tax fraud and bribery; he eventually pleaded “no
contest” to the charges. Still, the lasting effect of their actions is coursing
through our body politic today.

Agnew’s designation of the press as a liberal outfit hostile to conservative

thought laid the groundwork for the hyper-partisan right-wing media to build their
house on. It began on talk radio in the 1980s, then moved onto TV with Fox News,
and is now solidifying its presence on the internet.

From his very earliest days on talk radio, Rush Limbaugh attacked the media for its
liberal bias and discouraged viewers from taking it seriously. Limbaugh created the
model, in the 1980s, that others like Sean Hannity followed in the 1990s and
beyond. Shortly after 9/11, a huge segment of the Republican base was getting its
daily information from the “big three,” of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark
Levin; the irony was perhaps lost on conservatives that Agnew himself began his
attack with a criticism of ABC, NBC, and CBS.

In a unified chorus, conservative talk radio was sowing doubt into the legitimacy
of not only ABC, NBC, and CBS, but also the legacy newspapers, The New York Times
and Washington Post. Even when Limbaugh, Hannity, and others such as Laura Ingraham
were wrong and the “mainstream media” were right, they soldiered on. All three
predicted a Romney win in 2012 (with Limbaugh specifically predicting over 300
electoral votes). In 2008, when asked to predict a race that nearly everyone could
see would be a comfortable victory for Barack Obama, Limbaugh said that Obama had
been “dead in the water” since the primaries and called polls “worthless.” He told
his audience about a week before the election:

“My gut hadn’t been giving me any indication on this race, but it started talking
to me last night…Barack is headed back to Iowa. That should be a lock; it’s a dead
heat…Florida, Ohio and Nevada look like pretty good McCain certainties here. Obama
still has to run ads in California.”

Obama ended up winning all five states. In reality, Obama’s margin of victory
largely aligned with the polling averages, which gave him a consistent 7.6 percent
advantage. David Frum addressed the “conservative entertainment complex” during an
appearance on MSNBC on November 10, 2012:

Despite the accuracy of his criticism at the time, Frum overlooked a key point:
While it is the stalwart disregard for reality that gives those like Limbaugh their
power, that power doesn’t come from Limbaugh himself — it comes from his listeners.
No matter how often he gets it wrong, his listeners keep coming back.

Replication of Limbaugh’s model by the likes of Levin, Hannity, and others on Fox
News during Obama’s presidency made the Republican base susceptible to conspiracy
theorists like Alex Jones.

Smart right-wing punditry has — at many times — been able to credibly expose

cultural bias in the mainstream media. Those who work in media generally spend most
of their time on the coasts. But it’s not the liberal values of these cities that
damage the media’s perception — it’s the fact that they’re exceptionally large
cities and nearly half the country doesn’t live in one. Conservative writers like
Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz have credibly leveled this criticism, and the
media is probably better off because of it. But the “talk radio caucus” is an
entirely different entity. Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin regularly tell their
audiences to discount reality, so they can all create their own. In his description
of the two, conservative writer Kevin Williamson struck a great balance between
media criticism and how to read the actual news:

For conservatives, hating the media is a reflex, and sometimes a funny one.
Speaking on his ‘Morning Minute,’ Sean Hannity once read breathlessly from an
Associated Press report on a federal surveillance program, ending with the
instinctual harrumph: ‘The mainstream media won’t tell you about that!’ There is no
media more mainstream than the Associated Press, which is a nonprofit cooperative
owned by its member newspapers, television networks, and radio stations. Its
reports appear in practically every daily newspaper in the United States, and big
scoops like the one that caught Hannity’s eye routinely lead front pages from sea
to shining sea. The Associated Press has bias problems and some notable competency
problems, and, like any organization that does any substantive reporting, it makes
errors. But it does not, for the most part, traffic in fiction.
Williamson’s effort is valiant, but when he’s writing to the readers of National
Review, he’s mostly preaching to the choir. Those who get their news from Sean
Hannity aren’t going to care about what someone from an establishment right-wing
magazine has to say. With so many in the Republican base ready to ignore and
discount some of the most significant news stories in American history simply
because they were originally reported by the New York Times, it was only a matter
of time before someone like Trump took advantage. It’s true that people like
Limbaugh, Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro inarguably benefit from
Trump’s Presidency, but the relationship is much more symbiotic than people
realize. Sure, a lot of conservatives like to read National Review, the Weekly
Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, but the seeds of doubt are present in even
the Kevin Williamsons of the world. That is largely thanks to a wave of media
criticism spanning the last 40 years.

The two most famous incidents associated with Russian meddling in our 2016 election
remain the hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and of John Podesta’s
emails, the routine dissemination of fake stories throughout Facebook is often
downplayed or outright mocked. The Kremlin’s efforts included pro-Trump websites
run by teenagers in the Balkans, as well as the advancement of the now well-known
conspiracy theory, “Pizzagate.” It’s impossible to know what impact of these
stories on the election, but it’s worth noting that one person took the latter
seriously enough to show up at a pizza place and fire off a gun. That requires a
fundamentally different set of beliefs than most conservatives espoused during the
Nixon years, and even after.

In 2016, it wasn’t just that many on the Right already distrusted the legacy
newspapers. The near-constant influx of news — real or fake — created an
environment that made it difficult for people working in journalism, let alone the
average citizen at home, to discern what was legitimate and what was not. The
oversaturation, coupled with an entire segment of the Republican Party rejecting
every mainstream media source as biased, created an environment so frustrating that
a neutral person had to start assuming both sides were lying.

Frustration can lead to exasperation. Because voters cannot discern who is telling
the truth — Fox News or CNN — they tune out everything altogether. The ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
is physically expressed by the collective body politic; the belief in objective
truth begins to falter. Such an environment, in and of itself, is central to the
Kremlin’s manipulation of the Russian people. Writing in 2014, former Moscow-based
TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, said:

At the core of this strategy is the idea that there is no such thing as objective
truth. This notion allows the Kremlin to replace facts with disinformation. We saw
one example when Russian media spread a multitude of conspiracy theories about the
downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July, from claiming
that radar data showed Ukrainian jets had flown near the plane to suggesting that
the plane was shot down by Ukrainians aiming at Mr. Putin’s presidential jet. The
aim was to distract people from the evidence, which pointed to the separatists, and
to muddy the water to a point where the audience simply gave up on the search for
truth.
There is a general understanding that if you watch two different takes on the day’s
major news, “the truth ends up somewhere in the middle.” The Kremlin was able to
convince its people that knowing the truth was simply unattainable, and polls show
that Americans are starting to feel similarly — that they will never know what’s
real, so why bother.

To be clear, the Republican base doesn’t have a monopoly on the “fake news” genre.
There are elements of fake news on the left that are troubling, too. Overall it
lately consists of a few poorly constructed memes with fake quotes from Thomas
Jefferson. It’s nothing as serious as denying reality. And, if anything, even a
single false story allows Trump and his supporters to claim validation for their
charges of “fake news.”

This sort of environment helps support a president who has a very loose
relationship with the truth and devoted supporters. In July of 2017, the New York
Times broke a major story: Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner held
a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. While
most outlets — including those run by conservatives — conceded that this could be
the “smoking gun” documenting coordination between the Trump campaign and the
Russians, Trump’s supporters in the media went on the offensive.

Hannity himself cited a Politico piece from January 2017 and declared Hillary
Clinton the real guilty party. The Politico story and the actual story about Trump
Jr.’s meeting with a foreign adversary who interfered in our election couldn’t be
more different, but the coverage of both from Hannity and others on Fox News gave
Trump’s supporters all they needed to deny the significance of the meeting. For
many neutral observers, the water got so muddied that it was easy to assume stories
were covering “both sides.”

Trump thrives in these muddied waters. Maybe Obama did not really direct a wiretap
to be installed in Trump Tower, but the names of Trump’s associates were
“unmasked” — so it’s kind of the same. Maybe Trump did separate children from their
parents at the border, but maybe Obama and George W. Bush did it, too. Figuring out
the objective truth in each situation becomes so difficult that many don’t bother
looking for it at all.

The future begins to look more dangerous when you factor in two separate issues:

The rise of actual fake news via Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Dick Morris, and
Mike Cernovich.
Interference in our elections by the Russian government.
The latter point is especially relevant because — by all indications — the Russians
are planning to mount another propaganda campaign this coming November. With
somewhere around 54 percent of Republicans actively disbelieving anything reported
by the mainstream U.S. media, they are an easy target for disinformation.

And while the general health of our democracy can claim some small victories as of
late — to wit, Alex Jones’s suspension from all major platforms, most notably
Facebook and iTunes — it still seems like it’s in a precarious position.

Related to these issues, it’s inevitable that special counsel Robert Mueller will
eventually complete his investigation, and his findings could be incredibly
damaging for President Trump.

In a political environment where a majority of one party is ready to deny reality,

what will happen in Republicans ignore Mueller’s findings? Many in the media assume
that, eventually, the Nixon example will prove true: Republicans supported Nixon
right up until the moment he fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and then
abandoned him. Many assume that, eventually, a moment will come when the Mueller
investigation causes the fever to break.

Nixon completely changed the way a President interacts with the media. He had Agnew
relentlessly attack the media, and he himself was hostile toward reporters. But
Trump is a completely different animal. Perhaps the best example of this difference
is when Trump essentially gave up the game on Twitter:

Somehow, even when Trump essentially admitted that “fake news” is negative news
about him, his supporters don’t care. That’s a more troubling situation than we
ever faced with the likes of Agnew. So troubling, in fact, that it may answer the
question, “Why do Americans fall for fake news?”

Easy. “Because they want to.”

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David Podhaskie
I write for a legal newspaper. I suck without an editor.

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Responses
Applause from David Podhaskie (author)
Go to the profile of Mark Brux
Mark Brux
Aug 23
A massive end-run solution to deciding who to vote for is to ignore the passing
distractions of scandal-mongering news from any quarter (fake or real), & instead
cut to the chase & demand what the candidates' policy positions are that they
intend to implement in office: wonky though that sounds, that is what really
trickles down to affect your…

Conversation between Russell A. Whitehouse and David Podhaskie.

Go to the profile of Russell A. Whitehouse
Russell A. Whitehouse
Aug 8
Can I publish this on intpolicydigest.org?

Go to the profile of David Podhaskie

David Podhaskie
Aug 8
Sure Russell!

Go to the profile of Russell A. Whitehouse

Russell A. Whitehouse
Aug 10
https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/08/10/why-do-americans-fall-for-fake-news/

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