Why fact checking Trump is useless, and other things journalists still don’t understand about their permanent status as ‘enemy of the people’
Over the course of my 25-year career as a professional reporter, there is nothing I experienced that quite matches the pain of watching U.S. journalists under siege by President Donald Trump and his mob of fake-news followers. Even having left California four years ago for the southwest of France, the venom I see and hear every day directed at the media feels close and personal.
What makes it particularly hard to bear is not just its existence, but the utter futility with which U.S. journalists and media organizations have tried to respond. What is clear to me is that even after three years of Trumpism dominating every nanosecond of the news cycle, even after having been declared the “enemy of the people” by the sitting president of the United States, journalists have completely failed to the grasp the nature of the battle being fought, or the terrain on which it is being waged.
To understand the threat facing journalism in the U.S., one must understand that the single most important defining trait of the movement now led by Trump is the cult of victimhood.
The reality is that someone like Trump, and those that support him, represent ideas embraced by a shrinking minority of U.S. voters. And they largely represent a demographic that is always trending out if its majority position. To overcome these numerical disadvantages, this group must be constantly re-energized. The single best way to activate this group is to stoke their hate and anger by feeding their belief that they are the victim of larger forces beyond their control.
If you’re white and male, as much of this movement is, and you control most of the economy and all branches of government at the state and national level, how does one continue to cultivate a sense of victimhood in the face of all evidence to the contrary? One must find an enemy, preferably one that is eternal. Big government and immigration make for fun, eternal punching bags. And increasingly, the media has been, over the past decades, defined as the enemy. By the Angry White Males of Newt Gingrich in the 90s. By the Tea Parties of last decade. By Trump’s followers now.
This was not something Trump invented, but he recognized it, and mastered it beautifully. He uses it to rally his followers and to deflect all negative news. He is untouchable. The New York Times can spend more than a year plumbing the depths of Trump’s financial fraud to produce an impeccable, flawless masterpiece of journalism about how the Trump family may have defrauded the government out of more than $400 million in taxes over the years. And the story barely makes a ripple. It slides off the news cycle and Trump with a shrug and the flick of a tweet.
Journalists throw up their hands in disbelief. Liberals and Democrats send such stories ricocheting around social media, proclaiming, “Look! Look! See? How can you support him?” These befuddled masses continue to misdiagnose this information war. They believe this is a battle about facts, or truth, or reality, or bias. It is not.
Trump rose during an era of unprecedented “fact checking” by media organizations. The Reporters Lab at Duke University has identified more than 120 news organizations around the world that have some kind of fact-checking team. The Washington Post diligently counts every lie Trump tells. This obsession with fact checking, while well intended, shows just how badly journalists and liberals continue to misunderstand the dynamic they face. Surely just one more revelation or scandal will make Trump’s mobs see reason? Change minds? Face reality? Succumb to reason?
No. This mob of Trump followers is coming at journalists with knives and guns and bombs and fury in their hearts. In response, journalists want to give them library cards in the hopes of improving their minds and getting them to be more thoughtful citizens.
These mobs aren’t dumb. This isn’t about facts. It’s simply about the need to have an enemy and feel like a victim to stoke the anger. They can cannot be reasoned with. They cannot have their minds changed by one more revelation about Trump’s corruption. They cannot be fact-checked into changing their feelings about the role journalists play in civic life.
This mob has its ownwealth of right-wing propaganda in the guise of news, whether it’s Fox News or InfoWars. They dominate social media channels via sophisticated misinformation campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. A study by Ogury, a mobile marketing firm, found that right-wing audiences were far more fervant consumers of online media during the recent mid-terms. For instance, people who use the Fox News mobile app spend twice as long per session on the platform compared to say NBC News’ app, which had the second highest rate of engagement among news apps. Breitbart has a smaller, but a far more engaged audience which spends almost four times as much on the app during each visit compared to an NBC News users, Ogury found. “Our data paints a picture of a loyal but lackluster audience across the readerships of more traditional and liberal-leaning media outlets, which is in sharp contrast to the active and engaged audiences favouring the more conservative Fox News and Breitbart,” said Adam Rubach, UK Managing Director of Ogury, in a statement with the study.
Liberals are reading and thinking and chatting and debating and reflecting. Trump’s mobs are reading and foaming at the mouth. And that is exactly where the latter wants to be. They are not searching for facts. The are feeding the bottomless emotional monster of their victimhood.
When I first started working as a professional journalist in the pre-internet era of 1992, there were always those readers who accused newspapers of having a leftward tilt. Whether it was the letters I got addressed to Raleigh’s News & Observer labeling it the “Nuisance & Disturber”, or emails addressed to me at the San Jose Mercury News, aka, the “Murky News,” the distrust and suspicion was always out there. But this has escalated, and has been tortured, and has been deformed into something else entirely.
A recent Associated Press story about media hatred trickling further down to local reporters was particularly disturbing. In 2018, the Radio Television Digital News Association and the National Press Photographers Association are distributing safety and self-defense strategies to members. The story points to a blog post by news photographer Lori Bentley-Law on why she was quitting Los Angeles’ KNBC-TV: “I don’t ever again want a cute little girl in pigtails to look up at me and say, ‘We hate you.’ I don’t want to hear ‘Fake News’ shouted at me anymore. Or to be flipped off while driving my news van. Or worse yet, to have the passenger in the vehicle pacing me hang their naked butt out the window and defecate.” By virtue of walking out their door each day, no matter where they live, journalists are stepping into a war zone.
Because Trump’s mobs need an enemy. That enemy is the media. It is not the content of the media. It’s the very existence of the media they detest. They need the media to whip each other into a frenzy. No fact-checking browser plug-in, no community outreach, no attempts to sympathize with the plight of this class of self-imagined, delusional downtrodden will ever change that.
It is not an easy truth to face. Especially for such a self-flagellating bunch like journalists, always eager to accept blame, introspective to a fault, wringing their hands in guilt, wondering what offense they committed. Surely we did this to ourselves? Surely there must be some hidden grain of truth in the larger swirl of this media bashing? Maybe if we just run a 10-part series on TROUBLE IN THE HEARTLAND or TALKING TO TRUMP VOTERS then they will see we care and that are we are human just like them? No one wants to admit that a large swath of citizens detests the very fact of your existence as an institution. Worse, that they need to hate you to fuel their politics and agenda. It feels like giving up, or giving in to the darker instincts of a dark time.
None of this changes the reality. It is imperative, as this tide rises, that journalists fully absorb this truth if they are ever going to begin to formulate an effective response. Because it’s urgent that we move on to the next, even more difficult question that has no obvious or easy answer: How to effectively respond to this rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth, media-hating mob?
Chris O’Brien is based in Toulouse, France, where he is European Correspondent for technology news site VentureBeat, as well as a freelance journalist. He previously spent 15 years covering Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times.
