Category: media

David Blaska:

Did you know that The Capital Times and The Nation are mentioned in The Constitution of the United States? Specifically, in the First Amendment?

Neither did I. Sorry for the trick question, but John Nichols thinks they are.

In a piece blasting (who else?) Donald Trump (“The enemy of the people …” blah blah blah), Comrade Nichols makes this remarkable assertion:

… that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution …

The only “business”? You mean, haberdashers are left unprotected? Hod carriers bereft of the Constitution? HVAC contractors out in the unconstitutional cold?

Only “The Press,” aka the news media, enjoys that special status? Really, John?

It is typical of the Left to regard the term “the Press” to mean exclusively the institutional news media — the New York Times, CBS, CNN, et cetera. Corporations, all. Because the Left vigorously denies the blessings of free speech to us commoners, the deplorables!

The truth is that the basement conspiracy-monger,  high on mimeograph fluid, has as much First Amendment protection as Chuck Todd. The fact is that Koch Industries has every bit of constitutional protection for its free speech as The Capital Times or, for that matter, Stately Blaska Manor. Because nothing in the Constitution singles out one “business” for more constitutional protection than another.

Nichols, the news media corporations, and the Democrat(ic) party itself, are adamant that the First Amendment should be gelded to limit free speech only for the credentialed experts in Press Row. Where is your journalism degree?! Papers!

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Justice Scalia says the First Amendment means what it says:

The Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals … “All the provisions of the Bill of Rights set forth the rights of individual men and women — not, for example, of trees or polar bears. But the individual person’s right to speak includes the right to speak in association with other individual persons.

Surely the dissent does not believe that speech by the Republican Party or the Democratic Party can be censored because it is not the speech of “an individual American.”

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James Freeman replaced James Taranto on the essential Best of the Web Today beat, and here is his first offering:

Who says Donald Trump is against entitlement reform? While he probably won’t propose changes to Medicare or Social Security in his first budget proposal, the President seems eager to consider whether all members of the media establishment should continue to enjoy privileges not available to the average citizen.

CNN and the New York Times are upset they weren’t included in a Friday press briefing at the White House, even though they still had access to media pool reports filed that day. Almost all Americans—and for that matter almost all journalists—were also not invited to the meeting with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. But CNN and the Times seem to feel particularly offended.

CNN’s Jake Tapper said the White House guest list was “not acceptable” and “un-American.” Dean Baquet, executive editor at the Times, called it unprecedented and said, “Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.” The Times also ran a story this weekend comparing the rhetoric Mr. Trump uses for journalists who peddle “fake news” with the words of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who murdered millions of his countrymen.

But even the Times doesn’t think much of this comparison. On Saturday the paper ran a piece taunting Mr. Trump based on the Times conviction that even the highest elected official in the U.S. will ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s un-elected establishment. Reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael Grynbaum fault Mr. Trump for “believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.” The Times report adds that the President “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper said the White House guest list was “not acceptable” and “un-American.” Dean Baquet, executive editor at the Times, called it unprecedented and said, “Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.” The Times also ran a story this weekend comparing the rhetoric Mr. Trump uses for journalists who peddle “fake news” with the words of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who murdered millions of his countrymen.

But even the Times doesn’t think much of this comparison. On Saturday the paper ran a piece taunting Mr. Trump based on the Times conviction that even the highest elected official in the U.S. will ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s un-elected establishment. Reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael Grynbaum fault Mr. Trump for “believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.” The Times report adds that the President “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”

When trying to play the sympathetic victim whose rights are being violated, referring to oneself as part of an “iron triangle” is generally not recommended. Also, how often did Soviet dissidents get the chance to force-feed Stalin? If they could have found anything to eat presumably they would have kept it for themselves.

Apparently CNN can’t stick to the script either. The ubiquitous Mr. Grynbaum of the Times observes that both friends and foes of CNN President Jeffrey Zucker “say he can handle — and even relishes — a harsh spotlight.” The piece recounts how, while nibbling on filet mignon at a recent gathering of select reporters, Mr. Zucker said that his team wears Trump insults “as a badge of honor.” The headline notes that Mr. Trump and Mr. Zucker are “2 Presidents Who Love a Spectacle.”

If Mr. Zucker seems unconcerned about the possibility of being sent to the gulag, it’s perhaps because he knows that his First Amendment rights are not threatened. It is not essential to our democracy that the White House gives information first to particular entrenched media incumbents before sharing it with the public. And the First Amendment does not say that the New York Times and CNN must have an edge over smaller competitors.

Every politician has significant discretion over how to reach the public and which media outlets to favor. In 2009 President Obama chose in his first prime-time news conference to recognize a Huffington Post writer, bypassing various newspaper reporters. Mr. Obama also used YouTube to order the FCC to prevent telecom companies from charging YouTube and Netflix market rates for carrying their massive Internet traffic.

Last year the Times ran a front-page story saying that reporters who thought Mr. Trump was a dangerous demagogue “have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer.” More recently CNN happily broadcast repeated references to an accusation-filled “dossier” of negative rumors about Mr. Trump without bothering to confirm they were true.

The President can be forgiven for thinking that CNN and the Times have been trying to build the case for impeachment since Election Night. He has no obligation to help them. Along with refusing to give them an informational edge on their media competitors, this entitlement reform could be paired with an effort to make more government data available to everyone, and to make it more easily understandable and searchable, empowering amateur and professional journalists alike.

The latest NBC/WSJ poll suggests the issue could resonate. A full 86% of respondents agree with the following statement: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.” Also, a majority in the survey believe that the “news media and other elites are exaggerating the problems with the Trump Administration because they are uncomfortable and threatened with the kind of change that Trump represents.”

The survey sample skews Democratic, yet survey respondents have become more optimistic in the Trump era. Now 40% think the country’s headed “in the right direction,” compared to 33% two months ago and just 20% in December of 2015. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings, while still low by presidential standards, are also improving. And perhaps that’s what is most upsetting to CNN and the New York Times.

Charlie Sykes:

If President Trump’s first tumultuous weeks have done nothing else, at least they have again made us a nation of readers.

As Americans grapple with the unreality of the new administration, George Orwell’s “1984” has enjoyed a resurgence of interest, becoming a surprise best seller and an invaluable guide to our post-factual world.

On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.

At an event marking Black History Month last week, the president took a detour from a discussion of Frederick Douglass — he described the abolitionist as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more” — to talk about the press. “A lot of the media is actually the opposition party — they’re so biased,” he said. “So much of the media is the opposition party and knowingly saying incorrect things.”

Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.

Some outlets opened the door, by helping spread conspiracy theories and indulging the paranoia of the fever swamps. For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.

For conservatives, this should have made it clear that something was badly amiss in their media ecosystem. But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.

Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.

By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Mr. Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts,” she declared. Among “a large part of the population” what Mr. Trump said was the truth.

“When he says that millions of people illegally voted,” she said, his supporters believe him — and “people believe they have facts to back that up.”

Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” But Ms. Hughes’s comment was perhaps unintentionally insightful. Mr. Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.

The next few years will be a test of that thesis.

In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

Perhaps just as important, it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter. There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.

Jonah Goldberg, not a fan (as myself) of Donald Trump:

Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, had an unfortunate turn of phrase the other day. She said it’s the mission of the press to “control exactly what people think.”

My suspicion is that this was less a Freudian slip than a simple slip-up. Brzezinski was referring to her fear that President Trump may be trying to control the way people think by discrediting the media — whom he calls “enemies of the American people” — and she lost her rhetorical footing, stumbling into saying that mind control is “our job.”

But the misstatement resonated with a lot of people, as did Trump’s claim that the press is an enemy of the people.

The first thing that needs to be said is that whenever you hear a politician talk about “the American people,” either they’re over-generalizing to the point of banality, or they’re referring to only one segment of the American public. “The American people love an underdog” is an example of banality. The press “is the enemy of the American people” is a highly subjective declaration.

I don’t blame journalists for taking offense. It was a grossly irresponsible thing for the chief constitutional officer of our government to say. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point or that people are crazy for seeing it.

Which brings me back to Brzezinski’s comment about the media’s controlling how people think.

One need not paint with an overly broad brush or accuse the entire press corps of being part of a knowing conspiracy to manipulate the public. Many mainstream journalists sincerely believe they are operating in good faith and doing their job to the best of their abilities. At the same time, it seems patently obvious that the “objective” press is in the business of subjectively shaping attitudes rather than simply reporting facts.

Consider the hot topic of the moment: illegal immigration. The syndicate that distributes the column you are reading follows the AP stylebook, which says that I am not allowed to refer to “illegal immigrants” (i.e., people who migrate illegally), but I can refer to illegal immigration (i.e., the act of migrating illegally). Kathleen Carroll, then the senior vice president and executive editor of the Associated Press, explained that the change was part of the AP’s policy against “labeling people.”

Many news outlets followed suit, using such terms as “unauthorized” or “undocumented” to describe immigrants formerly known as illegal.

The move was hailed by left-wing immigration activists as a great leap forward. And for good reason: It is part of their agenda to blur the distinctions between legal and illegal immigration, and to make it sound as if objecting to the former is morally equivalent to objecting to the latter. But as a matter of fact and logic, the difference between an “unauthorized immigrant” and an “illegal immigrant” is nonexistent. The media play these kinds of linguistic games all the time.

Economics professor Tim Groseclose walks readers through countless examples in his book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Partial-birth abortion virtually never appears without a “so-called” before it, and the procedure is virtually never described clearly. The word “kill” is almost never used to describe any abortion, despite the fact that this is what happens. Whenever some great sweeping piece of liberal social legislation is passed by Democrats, it’s a “step forward.” Whenever a law is repealed, Republicans are “turning back the clock.”

The language games are part of a larger tendency of journalists to follow certain scripts that conform to how coastal elites see the country.

In 2015, during the ridiculous hysteria over Indiana’s religious-freedom law (since revised), a news reporter went around a small town asking business owners about the law. The owner of Memories Pizza, Crystal O’Connor, said anyone could eat there, but they’d probably turn down a job to cater a gay wedding. The story was immediately blown up by national news outlets as proof of some prairie fire of anti-gay discrimination, even though no one had been discriminated against. Memories Pizza had to shut down.

My hunch is that O’Connor nodded along when Trump said the press is the enemy of the American people.

Kevin D. Williamson:

The problem with the man currently leading the Republican party is that he is, as the Washington Post puts it, a hostage to the “fanatical policies of the extreme right.” His administration “insults women” and his unwelcome presence in public life “insults us all.” And, because the Republican party is all about the winning these days, the GOP establishment is “ready to forgive” . . . what? . . . “just about anything — as long as he wins.”

So says the Post, which is not alone in this estimate: Extreme on economic issues, extreme on the so-called social issues, he even has had an “extreme foreign-policy makeover,” according to The Atlantic. His views on immigration, MSNBC says, represent the Republican party “shrinking down to its most extreme elements.” One cable-news panelist insists he was the most extreme Republican presidential candidate ever. Paul Krugman laments that he has forsaken all serious policy thinking for “dangerous fantasy.” Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is also alert to the “dangers” he presents, the “most dangerous of all” being his views on Iran, though Kristof also worries that he is too buddy-buddy with that awful, scheming Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow dogpiled him for his perplexing relationship with Moscow. Vice calls him a “sociopath” and Maureen Dowd dismissed him as “an out-of-touch plutocrat” who keeps “his true nature . . . buried where we can’t see it,” a devious figure who is so awful deep down inside that he “must hide an essential part of who he is” from the public.

President Mitt Romney sounds like he would have been a riot. Alas, his presidency never came to pass, thanks in no small part to the hysteria chronicled above. Every Republican president is “the most extreme ever,” or so Democrats and their media friends insist. (“We do always say that,” one Democratic friend acknowledged. “And it is always true.” Well . . . )

In this corner, the American Press; in the opposite corner, the American President. The time has come for choosing sides — or so do many of our friends on the left and in the media (there is some crossover in that group) insist, as do more than a few of our friends on the right.

On Friday, I was scolded by Joe Hagan of New York magazine (he must have taken a break from the vital service he is offering to the republic at the moment, composing a biography of Jann Wenner) for daring to criticize my media colleagues in the age of Trump, “since you are supposedly a journalist.” It is, he insisted, “as if you, as a conservative, can’t see objective reality along with somebody you assume is a political opposite.” No, it is as if the American news media is predictably biased and incompetent, and would be writing almost precisely what it is writing about Donald Trump if the election had been won by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Pat Sajak. Or, as the example above shows, Mitt Romney, who is a great many things (some of them admirable) but hardly an “extremist” or a “danger” to the republic.

It is possible, if you are not mentally crippled, to hold your mind two non-exclusive ideas: Donald J. Trump stinks, and the press stinks. Trump’s spat with the press is a bloodless Iran–Iraq war, and I myself am cheering for (metaphorical) casualties. If you find yourself only able to focus on which party stinks worse, then you have adopted the pre-kindergarten “binary choice” rhetoric of the campaign, in which both Trump and Clinton supporters insisted that we must ignore the obvious character defects, financial shenanigans, lies, and foolishness of A or B on the theory that B or A is so much worse that we simply cannot acknowledge any shortcomings on the other side.

Those of us who have not entirely surrendered our neocortices to one cable-news tribe or the other are perfectly capable of criticizing Trump and criticizing the media.

Of course the American media is terrible. Everybody knows this. Everybody who follows the public debate about guns, taxes, or abortion knows this. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, knows this, which is why he sheepishly acknowledged that the so-called Newspaper of Record and its editors “don’t get religion.” And that is just a little bit of what they don’t get. Other senior editors at major media outlets know this, too. The people who run the Washington Post know this. The reflexive Democratic affiliation of most of the major media is a simple fact of life that you’d have to be foolish or dishonest to deny: Hell, I got the business about being a conservative when I was being considered for a copy-editor’s job a million years ago at the Philadelphia Inquirer—working in the sports section.

The tragedy of all this is that, yeah, we really could use an effective, active, and credible press right now. We have an active one five days out of the week, an effective one five days out of the month, and a credible one . . . not that often. My criticisms of Trump do not go so far as those who believe that he is a budding fascist dictator on the verge of building concentration camps, but if you really did believe that, wouldn’t you wish, at least a little, that the media hadn’t been exactly as hysterical when faced with the bland, anodyne visage of Mitt Romney? Or John McCain? You want to be taken seriously now after insisting that Dick Cheney was the new American Gestapo?

The last wolf show we bought tickets for wasn’t really all that spectacularly lupine.

It would be really very useful to have an authoritative source. I do not agree with Barack Obama about much of anything, but there is something to his argument that our public discourse suffers from our lack of anything that might be generally agreed upon as an authoritative source. The problem is that Barack Obama believes that this authoritative source should be Rachel Maddow or someone like her, or the editorial columns of the New York Times, dopey and predictable as they are. And, of course, there are people like Joe Hagan of New York, who believe that the current moment is simply too dangerous—it’s always dangerous with these people—to acknowledge that.

Hagan’s opposite number is a correspondent who on the same day sneered at me for relying on the New York Times as a source for a historical question, because we all know that no conservative can trust the New York Times. The Times column in question was written by the eminent historian John Lukacs, whose conservative bona fides are such that there is literally a chapter on him in a book called Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America 1950–1985, alongside Russell Kirk, Michael Novak (RIP), and William F. Buckley Jr. It did not matter to him what was written or by whom, only that it came from the other side—from the enemy camp.

We deserve a better press, and a better president, too. If you are the sort of partisan who cannot entertain the possibility that both of these things may be true at the same time, then you ought to consider the possibility that you are one of the reasons why we do not have a better press or a better president.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445054/media-trump-both-unreliable?utm_content=buffer4b906&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

On Presidents Day, Jonah Goldberg writes about how he  …

… watched the reaction to President Trump’s press conference. My friend Mollie Hemingway captured a very widespread sentiment out there:

“I would watch a @realDonaldTrump press conference at any time of any day. It’s just so entertaining.”

And I agree with her: It certainly was entertaining in parts. In other parts, not so much. But the problem is that entertainment value is one of the lowest standards one can hold a president to. … And it may be entertaining to watch a president of the United States spill out his id on national television like a torn net full of mackerel on a dock. But if that’s a standard for how to judge a presidential press conference, why didn’t we elect Charlie Sheen?

I keep hearing from conservative pundits that a lot of people out in the “real world” thought this press conference was awesome. I’m sure this is true. But I wonder how many conservative pundits realize that the people who thought it was awesome are already in Trump’s amen corner (and that these are precisely the folks that conservative pundits are most likely to hear from — and depend on?). Does anyone seriously believe that Trump persuaded significant numbers of people who didn’t already love him?

I’ve written a bunch about the MacGuffinization of American politics in recent years. Ace of Spades coined the term to describe how the media covered Barack Obama. They cast him as the hero of a drama and the only goal was to see how he overcame problems. It didn’t matter if he was wrong on policy — including the Constitution — what mattered was whether he emerged victorious. “In a movie or book, ‘The MacGuffin’ is the thing the hero wants,” Ace explained. “Usually the villain wants it too, and their conflict over who will end up with The MacGuffin forms the basic spine of the story.” Further on, Ace writes:

Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie. As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.

It was the MacGuffin dynamic that first made me realize that Trump could defeat Hillary Clinton.

Now the MacGuffin thing is just a useful metaphor or analogy. But the dynamic it captures goes to the very core of humanity. While working on my book, I’ve come to believe more than ever that man is a story-telling animal and that stories are what give us meaning, direction, and passion. Hume’s point about reason being a slave to passion should be more properly understood as “reason is a slave to narrative.” But we can talk more about that later.

The relevant point here is that Trump was right when he said yesterday that he didn’t divide America, it was divided when he showed up. What concerns me is that vast numbers of conservatives who lamented the MacGuffinized presidency and media of the Obama era have grabbed with both hands the MacGuffinized presidency of Donald Trump.

It is entirely true that the press served as an eager participant in the story of Obama. It is also entirely true that much of the mainstream media is playing the reverse role in the story of Trump’s presidency. And, it’s also the case that much of the conservative media is now playing the role they once decried in the MSM. The same people who rolled their eyes at every clickbait headline blaring “Watch as Jon Stewart DESTROYS” this or that Republican now cheer as Trump rails against the “Failing New York Times” or “Very Fake News.” It doesn’t matter that Trump’s arguments are as bogus, selective, or disingenuous as Stewart’s. What matters is to cheer the “butt hurt” of Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta or some other enemy. …

Sean Hannity has taken to calling Chuck Todd a leader of something called “the alt-left,” a thing that is not a thing except in Hannity’s studio. (The “alt” in “alt-right” refers to a desire to replace the traditional Right with a new tribalist-nationalist Right. What “Left” is Chuck Todd trying to replace? This is weak-tea Alinskyite distraction.)

I’m reminded of that old saying, “Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself defending Chuck Todd.”

Now, that’s not entirely fair since I’ve always liked Todd, despite our fairly frequent disagreements. But you know what I mean. And I also agree with Mollie that the mainstream media has a lot to answer for when it comes to how they’ve treated conservatives and Republican presidents. I’ve written literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of words on this very point. And while I think Mollie is being unfair to Chuck here, I also think she misses the point.

When Donald Trump says any — and I mean any — negative coverage of him is fake, he’s making a very, very different claim than that of traditional bias. He is saying that news stories — with multiple sources from his administration, sometimes on the record — are simply fabricated. And just because the self-loving press idiotically takes the bait every time, handing him the mallet to bludgeon them with, doesn’t change the fact that the president of the United States is not only wrong, he’s lying. Yes, the New York Times gets stories wrong (News flash!), but it is not a work of fiction.

The argument one often hears from anti-anti-Trump conservatives is that they’re just holding the mainstream media accountable. Fine. Do that. But if you don’t show much interest in holding a president — who is the leader of the Republican party and maybe the conservative movement — accountable, then you’ve become an accomplice to the hero in a MacGuffinized presidency. One can see this most clearly when you hear radio- and TV-show hosts dismiss an argument by noting it comes from some alleged “Trump hater.” It’s the exact same tactic liberals used against those of us who criticized Bill Clinton. My animosity for Bill Clinton didn’t make him play football-coach-and-the-cheerleader with an intern. Likewise, my alleged feelings about Trump don’t make me wrong when I point out he’s lying when he says he won in a historic landslide or when he insists that his administration has been humming like a well-oiled machine.

Whether he understands what he’s doing or not, Trump’s goal is to delegitimize any critical voices. I think he’s motivated more by narcissism than by some evil-genius scheme, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is truth. We are entering a phase where everything is measured not by veracity, but by feeling: If certain facts make us feel like “our side” is losing, then those facts aren’t real. If certain fictions make the other side feel bad, then they are facts. Again, Trump didn’t create this sorry dynamic, but he is accelerating it at blistering speed. I’m less concerned about “fake news” than I am by fake opinions — by which I mean the widespread tendency to score political arguments based upon how much applause they will get from your team.

Reading Kevin Williamson’s terrific essay on President’s Day, I’m of a mind to think the presidency has always been MacGuffinized. But just because a problem has a long pedigree doesn’t mean the problem can’t get worse. I know I use this line from Orwell too much (and I’m eager to hear suggestions for substitutes), but it captures the dynamic of the moment so well: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Collectively, we’re all getting drunk on our feelings and then failing all the more completely for it.

Hillsdale College Prof. Nathan Schlueter:

One of the most intriguing developments in our current unpredictable political climate has been the Left’s co-opting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as a dramatic warning of the dangers of the Trump administration. The book has surged to first place on Amazon’s best-seller list, and a stage production is in the works. Michiko Kakutani’s recent New York Times article “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read” highlights the kind of connections liberals are making between, say, Kellyanne Conway’s appeal to “alternative facts” and “Newspeak,” the reductive language of 1984 designed to “narrow the range of thought.”

I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse Kakutani’s suggestion that people take up and read 1984, not only because any increase in substantive reading by ordinary Americans is a good thing, but also because readers may discover there something quite different from what they are being lead to expect, something that they have great need to know. 1984 is not a warning against populist despotism, troubling as that possibility may be. It is a warning against socialism, whose inner dynamic always tends towards totalitarianism.

Begin with a fact that virtually every recent piece on 1984 fails to mention: The governing philosophy of Oceania is “English Socialism.” The ruler of Oceania, Big Brother, with his “heavy black mustache,” looks unmistakably like Joseph Stalin; members of the Party address one another as “Comrade”; and the non-party members of Oceania are called “proles” (short for proletariat), an allusion that clearly identifies the provenance of the ideas Orwell is criticizing. From its opening lines, 1984 captures the grim atmosphere and grinding poverty of socialism: “Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled in his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.” The description could fit any city behind the Iron Curtain.

1984 can fruitfully be read alongside two other warnings against socialist totalitarianism, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943), which were published several years before 1984 (1949).

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek traces the logic that leads from socialism to totalitarianism. Socialism seeks to overcome the greed, waste, competitiveness, and inequality generated by the free market with central economic planning by administrative and regulatory “experts.” But whoever controls the means of life, Hayek observed, necessarily controls the ends of life. Moreover, central planning, because it requires minute and particular decisions by some centralized political authority, is incompatible with the rule of law and limited government. The concentration and exercise of power required by central planning explains “Why the Worst Get on Top,” as one chapter puts it.

Oceania, with its Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, and Ministry of Love, with its constantly shifting quotas and rations of coffee, gin, shoes, and cigarettes, where “nothing [is] illegal, since there [are] no longer any laws” (but where one can still be “punished by death”), where the rulers live in luxury while systematically depriving others of basic needs, where all mediating institutions between the state and the individual have been crowded out, eroded, or deliberately destroyed, exemplifies the bureaucratic and despotic nightmare of centralized planning. As the book describing the aims of Oceania’s Party states: “It had long been recognized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.”

Hayek shows why the central planning required by socialism ultimately undermines its own ends. And indeed, the socialist Party in Oceania only nominally pursues the original goals of socialism. This fact perplexes the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY,” he writes in his diary.

The deep roots of this “why” can be found in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. There Lewis uncovers the philosophical roots of socialist totalitarianism: Francis Bacon’s scientific project to conquer nature for the relief of human suffering. That project entails a reconceptualization of nature, from an intelligible order of formal and final causes to mere matter in motion that must be “tortured” by human technology to reveal its secrets. To assist this project, Bacon in his New Atlantis invented a new form of literature, “science fiction,” in which he celebrated the complete scientific domination of nature.
But as Lewis’s argument suggests, the culmination of the Baconian project is not New Atlantis but 1984. On the one hand, Lewis points out that technology never simply increases “mankind’s” power over nature. It always only increases the power of some men over other men. Moreover, nature as Bacon conceived of it excludes the possibility of a “natural moral law” (what Lewis called the “Tao”) that might restrain and guide “nature,” or raw appetite. Left unchecked, therefore, the Baconian project of increasing man’s power over “nature” must eventually result in the victory of “nature” over man.

This victory of “nature” over man does not consist in the denial of this or that particular truth (for example, the size of the crowd at a presidential inauguration), as troubling as that might be; it rests on the denial of the possibility of truth. Confidence that truth exists is the foundation for Winston’s hope that the Party will one day be defeated. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows,” he writes in his diary. The same point is made by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus: “Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense.”

The concept of truth entails the possibility that the mind can conform correctly (or incorrectly) to extra-mental reality, and therefore that there is something in nature (and human nature) that can resist domination and control. But as Immanuel Kant clearly saw (the epigraph for his First Critique is from Bacon), Baconian science rests on the assumption that reality conforms to the mind, not the mind to reality. This is not far from the claim that the mind makes reality.

O’Brien, the novel’s voice of the socialist Party, denies that there is any “objective reality” apart from the mind. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else,” he tells Winston. “You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.” O’Brien’s aim is to “cure” Winston of the “insane” belief that there is any reality apart from his will. O’Brien makes clear to Winston what this surrender will mean. “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” he tells Winston. “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.” Is this the ultimate consequence of an educational system predicated upon cultural relativism and the systematic denial that truth exists?

There is one other source of hope for Winston: “If there is hope it lies in the proles.”Unlike the members of the Party, the proles are given almost complete freedom to travel, buy, sell, trade, and otherwise spend their leisure. Winston is attracted to a natural goodness he sees in the proles. He writes in his diary about watching a violent war film that features the dismemberment of small children by a bomb. The audience cheers, “but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of the kids it aint until the police turned her out.”

Later, observing with “mystical reverence” a prole woman singing outside his window as she hangs her laundry, he comments: “The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. . . . You were dead; theirs [i.e., the proles’] was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two makes four.” Winston’s arrest occurs immediately after this episode.

But Orwell shows the reader the proles alone are not a real alternative to totalitarianism, but a complement to it. Although the Party does not directly control the proles, it rules them inwardly by feeding them on a steady diet of mass-engineered sentimental music and pornographic literature. This along with “films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled the horizon of their minds.” Orwell highlights the fact that the proles are also without a conception of truth, because they lack the capacity for making the kind of universal judgments that truth requires, and “being without general ideas, they could only focus [their discontent] on petty specific grievances.” At one point Winston attempts to learn from an old prole what life was like before the revolution, but all he can get are particular descriptions: “A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information.” Expressive individualism, fed on Hollywood pop culture, assists, rather than resists, totalitarianism.

In the end, 1984 is an unbelievably dark novel, but there are moments of light, and those moments are instructive. What they show is that the prospects for resistance to socialist totalitarianism rest in fundamentally conservative sentiments and ideas. Those sentiments and principles consist in the affirmation of transpolitical goods that set firm limits to political authority. Two of these moments are worth mentioning.

One day while surreptitiously exploring the shops in the prole part of town, Winston comes across a heavy lump of glass with a pink piece of sea coral in its center. He is immediately attracted to it, and purchases it. “What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. . . . The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.” Orwell then adds: “It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.”

In this moment Winston transcends the Baconian conception of nature that surrounds him. The coral at the center of the glass ball exemplifies nature, and the glass ball exemplifies culture. Coral is the skeleton of a sea polyp, which — to quote Shakespeare on coral in another place – “suffers a sea change / Into something rich and strange” (The Tempest I, ii, 399–400). Coral points to the ultimate beneficence of nature, to its capacity to bring beauty even out of death. The purpose of the glass ball, a work of art, is not to use up or destroy the coral, but to preserve it and to present it for human contemplation.

The paperweight is a symbolic education in limited government. It reflects not Bacon’s godless nature, but “nature and Nature’s God,” which point to goods like beauty and truth that transcend, and therefore set limits to, politics. But in 1984 even the comfort of this experience is fleeting. When Winston is later arrested, someone smashes the paperweight on the hearthstone. “The fragment of coral, a tiny crackle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it was!”

The other moment involves Winston’s romance with Julia. One of the aims of the Party is to control and direct the sexual impulses of its members through arranged marriages and organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, of which Julia is a leader even as she covertly despises it. When they first secretly meet in the country for a sexual liaison, Winston asks Julia, “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing itself?” Julia responds, “I adore it.” Orwell then writes: “This was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: That was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. . . . Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.” …

In conclusion, the person reading 1984 for insight into America’s current political situation should ask a number of questions: Which political party had a leading presidential candidate proudly declare himself to be a socialist? Which party’s president consistently sought to expand the regulatory administrative state, often by lawless means? Which party dominates the institutions of higher learning, where the possibility of truth has been consistently undermined by assumptions of skepticism, scientism, and value relativism, and where utility has replaced contemplation as the end of education? Which party controls America’s public-school system, where these same ideas are consistently promoted? Which party is most closely associated with Hollywood’s celebration of sexual liberation and sentimentalism? Finally, which party has sought to elevate the state over God by coercing private individuals to violate their consciences?

In sum, if 1984 has a practical lesson, it is this: There is a world of difference between a despotism dedicated to the expansion of socialism through federal-government power and a despotism dedicated to dismantling it. The former suffocates; the latter, though not without its serious dangers, just might create room to breathe. Conservatives must work to ensure that this breathing space becomes the occasion for the revival of true conservative ideas, principles, and sentiments.

Regardless of your definition of “fake news,” everyone should be able to agree that the media is not doing its job when it prints stories that are blatantly false.

And here’s what the media did since Donald Trump’s election, according to Daniel Payne:

Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates

After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.

Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.

At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.

At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”

She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.

November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New YorkMagazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”

The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.

It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.

December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure

At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Wellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Wellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Wellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’

Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.

To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.

January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy

On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”

January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter

During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.

How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).

The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.

Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.

January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department

On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.

The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.

There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).

More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.

As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair

On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.

The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.

January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax

Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.

January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake

Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for theoretical justice Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie

On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”

Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.

The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.

There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico

On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”

Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Lurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions

Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.

A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.

At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.

In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”

February 2: Renaming Black History Month

At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.

The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures

On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.

The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).

Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).

The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)

As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.

The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.

As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”