Fake news – is Donald Trump right?

Fake news has become one of the key phrases connected with the presidency of Donald Trump. Supposedly, the idea can be used to dismiss news stories you just disagree with – if news doesn’t match your world view, it can be discarded as fake – and the news media (both in America and the UK) has taken great umbrage at Trump referring to their output as fake. But is there more to it than that? Recently, American news networks have put out a considerable number of stories about Trump which were simply untrue. Could Trump’s judgement that the news is fake and biased against him have some credence?

On Friday, December 1, ABC News reported that former national security advisor Michael Flynn was ready to testify that Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to contact Russian officials. This was a big deal, until a day later, when the network was forced to issue a clarification that Trump was, at the time, president-elect. This was a huge difference – incoming administrations routinely communicate with foreign leaders, and so the story was a big nothing burger. The reporter responsible for the story, Brian Ross, was suspended for four weeks.

All I want is impartial reporting of news, rather than a media that is defining itself in opposition to the presidency

A week later, on Friday, December 8, CNN spent a great deal of time jubilantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that proved Wikileaks had secretly offered the Trump campaign special access to the leaked Democratic National Committee emails before they were published on the internet. This was a big deal – it would have proved collusion between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks and, consequently, between Trump and Russia, as the US intelligence community regards Wikileaks as an ‘arm of Russian intelligence’. This entire revelation was based on an email CNN implied it had exclusively obtained, and it was a smoking gun because it was dated September 4 – ten days before Wikileaks promoted the emails online.

As you may have guessed, the story was wrong.

Not only was it wrong, but it was wrong in a way that basic fact checking should have found – they got the date completely wrong. It was sent on September 14, and so it simply encouraged the Trump campaign to look at already publicly available information.

If journalists and news outlets are so offended by being attacked as ‘fake news’, they have a basic responsibility to ensure that the information they provide is correct

After the story was exposed as false, CNN went on to claim that they had never see the email and that ‘two sources’ had independently provided them with the false information. Apparently, multiple sources cropped up elsewhere – CBS News claimed to have also verified the story later that day, and MSNBC correspondent spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims with these false assertions, confirmed by ‘two sources with direct knowledge of this’.

Even our own BBC got in on the action. On Monday, November 6, the Beeb (and CNN) ran a story that Trump had grown impatient feeding fish on his Asian tour, and dumped all the food in a koi carp pond. The BBC News Channel analysed the incident in detail, and noted that Trump was ‘uncouth’ and ‘lacking in patience’ – it transpired that the video the Beeb used had been edited to create a Trump gaffe, and that the President was merely following the lead of fellow fish feeder Shinzo Abe.

You may ask why these stories (and I’ve only presented a few from a large selection) matter – after all, Trump is fairly reprehensible, right? Perhaps, but running fake news only serves to prove that Trump is correct and so devalues their future credibility. If journalists and news outlets are so offended by being attacked as ‘fake news’, they have a basic responsibility to ensure that the information they provide is correct (or, at the very least, take action if they are fed false information – the networks are currently protecting their sources and refusing any accountability for the errors).

Anyone who watches CNN or the BBC and wants to claim that they are massively fair on Trump is clearly not paying enough attention

In response to these fake news stories, CNN pundit David Frum blamed – you guessed it – Donald Trump. He claimed that these mistakes occurred ‘in the process of exposing the lies’ that the administration tells, but that these mistakes are ‘precisely the reason people should trust the media.’ The most interesting claim he makes is that these mistakes occur because of an ‘overzealous effort to be fair to the president.’ Now, anyone who watches CNN or the BBC and wants to claim that they are massively fair on Trump is clearly not paying enough attention. A more interesting point stems out of this line of thinking, though if these are just innocent mistakes, why is every single one anti-Trump, or designed to do damage to the Trump presidency?

CNN’s Jim Acosta has trumpeted his belief that journalists under Donald Trump have a duty to ‘resist’ – rather than, say, reporting news and facts. Only 7% of journalists identify as Republicans (as of 2013), so I’m not expecting them to massively like the president; all I want is impartial reporting of news, rather than a media that is defining itself in opposition to the presidency. It is becoming the case that the media is happy to report any story, true or false, if it can hurt Donald Trump, and that is a worrying development – news is rapidly becoming anti-Trump propaganda.

Donald Trump is not, by any means, a perfect character, and there are many faults that can be picked with him. But it can never be the job of a supposedly impartial news media to run as an opposition party, to the extent that stories are being made up in an effort to damage him. In this increasingly polarised time, all sides are putting out ‘fake news’ and getting furious when being accused of doing so. Maybe the perfect solution to solve this problem could simply be taking the time to verify stories and ensure that they are actually true – is that too much to ask for?