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Fake News in America: Homegrown, and Far From New
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Posted on Dec 18, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The media landscape in America is dominated by fake news. It has been for
decades. This fake news does not emanate from the Kremlin. It is a
multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that is skillfully designed and managed
by public relations agencies, publicists and communications departments on
behalf of individuals, government and corporations to manipulate public
opinion. This propaganda industry stages pseudo-events to shape our
perception of reality. The public is so awash in these lies, delivered 24
hours a day through electronic devices and print, that viewers and readers
can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction.
Donald Trump and the racist-conspiracy theorists, generals and billionaires
around him inherited and exploited this condition, just as they have
inherited and will exploit the destruction of civil liberties and collapse
of democratic institutions. Trump did not create this political, moral and
intellectual vacuum. It created him. It created a world where fact is
interchangeable with opinion, where celebrities have huge megaphones simply
because they are celebrities, where information must be entertaining and
where we can all believe what we want to believe regardless of truth. A
demagogue like Trump is what you get when you turn culture and the press
into burlesque.
Journalists long ago gave up trying to describe an objective world or give a
voice to ordinary men and women. They became conditioned to cater to
corporate demands. News personalities, who often make millions of dollars a
year, became courtiers. They peddle gossip. They promote consumerism and
imperialism. They chatter endlessly about polls, strategies, presentation
and tactics or play guessing games about upcoming presidential appointments.
They fill news holes with trivial, emotionally driven stories that make us
feel good about ourselves. They are incapable of genuine reporting. They
rely on professional propagandists to frame all discussion and debate.
There are established journalists who have spent their entire careers
repackaging press releases or attending official briefings or press
conferencesI knew several when I was with The New York Times. They work as
stenographers to the powerful. Many such reporters are highly esteemed in
the profession.
The corporations that own media outlets, unlike the old newspaper empires,
view news as simply another revenue stream. Revenue streams compete inside a
corporation. When the news division does not make what is seen as enough
profit, the ax comes down. Content is irrelevant. The courtiers in the
press, beholden to their corporate overlords, cling ferociously to their
privileged and well-compensated perches. Because they slavishly serve the
interests of corporate power, they are hated by Americas workers, whom they
have rendered invisible. They deserve the hate they get.
Most of the sections of a newspaperlife style, travel, real estate and
fashion, among othersare designed to appeal to the 1 percent. They are
bait for advertising. Only about 15 percent of any newspaper is devoted to
news. If you were to remove from that 15 percent the content provided by the
public relations industry inside and outside government, news falls to
single digits. For broadcast and cable news, the figure for real,
independently reported news would hover close to zero.
The object of fake news is to shape public opinion by creating fictional
personalities and emotional responses that overwhelm reality. Hillary
Clinton, contrary to how she often was portrayed during the recent
presidential campaign, never fought on behalf of women and childrenshe was
an advocate for the destruction of a welfare system in which 70 percent of
the recipients were children. She is a tool of the big banks, Wall Street
and the war industry. Pseudo-events were created to maintain the fiction of
her concern for women and children, her compassion and her connections to
ordinary people. Trump never has been a great businessman. He has a long
history of bankruptcies and shady business practices. But he played the
fictional role of a titan of finance on his reality television show, The
Apprentice.
The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false
in the old familiar senses, Daniel Boorstin
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-J-Boorstin ;) writes in his
book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. The very same
advances which have made them possible have also made the imageshowever
planned, contrived, or distortedmore vivid, more attractive, more
impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.
Reality is consciously deformed to easily digestible sound bites and
narratives. Those involved in public relations, political campaigns and
government stay relentlessly on message. They do not deviate from the simple
sound bite or cliché they are instructed to repeat. It is a species of
continuous baby talk. And it dominates the news and talk shows on the
airwaves.
The refinements of reason and shading of emotion cannot reach a
considerable public, Edward Bernays
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/specials/bernays-obit.html ;) , the
father of modern public relations, noted cynically.
The rapid-fire, abbreviated format of television precludes complexities and
nuance. Television is about good and evil, black and white, hero and
villain. It makes us confuse induced emotions with knowledge. It reinforces
the mythic narrative of American virtue and goodness. It pays homage through
carefully selected experts and specialists to the power elites and the
reigning ideology. It shuts out, discredits or ridicules all who dissent.
Is the Democratic establishment so clueless it believes its party lost the
presidential election because of the leaked John Podesta emails
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails ;) and FBI Director James
Comeys decision
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email.htm
l ) , shortly before the vote, to send a letter to Congress related to
Clintons private email server? Cant the Democratic leadership see that the
root cause of the defeat was that it abandoned workers in order to promote
corporate interests? Doesnt it understand that although its lies and
propaganda worked for three decades, Democrats eventually lost credibility
among those they had betrayed?
The Democratic establishments outrage over the email leak to the website
WikiLeaks ignores the fact that such disclosure of damaging information is a
tactic routinely used by the U.S. government and other governments,
including Russias, to discredit individuals and entities. It is a staple of
press coverage. No one, even within the Democratic Party, has made a
convincing case that the Podesta emails were fabricated. These emails are
real. They cannot be labeled fake news.
As a foreign correspondent, I was routinely given leaked, sometimes
classified, information by various groups or governments seeking to damage
certain targets. The national intelligence agency of Israel, the Mossad,
told me about a small airport owned by the Iranian government outside of
Hamburg, Germany. I went to the airport and wrote an investigative piece
(http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/15/world/nuclear-trail-special-report-vast-s
muggling-network-feeds-iran-s-arms-program.html?pagewanted=all ) that found
that, as the Israelis had correctly informed me, Iran was using it to break
down nuclear equipment, ship it to Poland, reassemble it and send it on
transport planes to Iran. The airport was shut down after my exposé.
In another instance, the U.S. government gave me documents showing that an
important member of the Cypriot parliament and his law firm were laundering
money for the Russian mafia. My story
(http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/world/cyprus-shores-wash-dirty-money.html
?pagewanted=all ) crippled the law firms legitimate business and prompted
the politician to sue The New York Times and me. Times lawyers chose not to
challenge the suit in a Cypriot court, saying they could not get a fair
trial there. They told me that, to avoid arrest, I should not visit Cyprus
again.
I could fill several columns with examples like these.
Governments do not leak because they care about democracy or a free press;
they leak because it is in their interest to bring down someone or
something. In most cases, because the reporter verifies the leaked
information, the news is not fake. It is when the reporter does not verify
the informationas was the case when The New York Times uncritically
reported the Bush administrations false charge that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction in Iraqthat he or she becomes part of the vast
fake news industry.
Fake news is now being used in an attempt to paint independent news sites,
including Truthdig, and independent journalists as witting or unwitting
agents of Russia. Elites of the Republican and Democratic parties are using
fake news in an attempt to paint Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin and
invalidate the election. No persuasive evidence for such accusations has
been made public. But the fake news has become the battering ram in the
latest round of Red baiting.
In a Dec. 7 letter to Truthdig
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/heres_the_washington_posts_response_let
ter_to_20161208 ) , a lawyer for The Washington Post, which printed an
article Nov. 24 about allegations that Truthdig and some 200 other websites
had been tools of Russian propaganda, said that the articles author, Craig
Timberg, knows the identity of the anonymous accusers at PropOrNot, a group
that made the charges. [Editors note: The lawyer wrote, in part, concerning
the Nov. 24 story and PropOrNot, The description in the Article was based
on substantial reporting by Mr. Timberg, including numerous interviews,
background checks of specific individuals involved in the group (whose
identities were known to Timberg, contrary to your speculation).
] The
Post says it has to protect PropOrNots anonymity. It passed along a false
accusation without evidence. The victims in this case cannot respond
adequately because the accusers are anonymous. Those who are smeared are
told that they should appeal to PropOrNot to get their names removed from
the groups blacklist. The circular reasoning gives credibility to
anonymous groups that draw up blacklists and fake news as well as to the
lies they disseminate.
The 20th centurys cultural and social transformation, E.P. Thompson
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/06/ep-thompson-unconventional-hi
storian) wrote in his essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism, has turned out to be much more than the embrace of an economic
system or the celebration of patriotism. It is, he pointed out, part of a
revolutionary reinterpretation of reality. It marks the ascendancy of mass
culture and the destruction of genuine culture and genuine intellectual
life.
Richard Sennett
(http://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/templates/home.aspx?pageid=1&cc=gb)
, in his book The Fall of the Public Man, identified the rise of mass
culture as one of the prime forces behind what he termed a new collective
personality
generated by a common fantasy. And the centurys great
propagandists would not only agree but would add that those who can
manipulate and shape those fantasies determine the directions taken by the
collective personality.
This huge internal pressure, hidden from public view, makes the production
of good journalism and good scholarship very, very difficult. Those
reporters and academics who care about the truth and dont back down are
subjected to subtle and at times overt coercion and often are purged from
institutions.
Images, which are how most people now ingest information, are especially
prone to being made into fake news. Language, as the cultural critic Neil
Postman (http://neilpostman.org/ ;) wrote, makes sense only when it is
presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or
sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or a listener is
deprived of what was said before and after. Images do not have a context.
They are visible in a different way. Images, especially when they are
delivered in long, rapid-fire segments, dismember and distort reality. The
condition recreates the world in a series of idiosyncratic events.
Michael Herr, who covered the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, observed
that the images of the war presented in photographs and on television,
unlike the printed word, obscured the brutality of the conflict. Television
and news were always said to have ended the war, Herr said. I thought the
opposite. These images were always seen in another contextsandwiched in
between commercials, so that they became a blancmange
(https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/blancmange ;) in the public
mind. I think if anything, the blancmange coverage prolonged the war.
A populace divorced from print and bombarded by discordant and random images
is robbed of the vocabulary as well as the historical and cultural context
to articulate reality. Illusion is truth. A whirlwind of emotionally driven
cant feeds our historical amnesia.
The internet has accelerated this process. It, along with cable news shows,
has divided the country into antagonistic clans. Members of a clan watch the
same images and listen to the same narratives, creating a collective
reality. Fake news abounds in these virtual slums. Dialogue is shut down.
Hatred of opposing clans fosters a herd mentality. Those who express empathy
for the enemy are denounced by their fellow travelers for their supposed
impurity. This is as true on the left as it is on the right. These clans and
herds, fed a steady diet of emotionally driven fake news, gave rise to
Trump.
Trump is adept at communicating through image, sound bites and spectacle.
Fake news, which already dominates print and television reporting, will
define the media under his administration. Those who call out the mendacity
of fake news will be vilified and banished. The corporate state created this
monstrous propaganda machine and bequeathed it to Trump. He will use it.
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