“Why The Media Can’t Tell The Truth About Donald Trump’s Lies”: Fact-Checking Rains On The Parade Of Media Revenue Models
On Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump retweeted an objective lie. The lie claimed that 81 percent of murdered white people are killed by black people. In truth, 84 percent of murdered white people are murdered by other white people, almost the exact opposite the claim. Not only were the statistics wrong, but the tweet cited the “Crime Statistics Bureau—San Francisco.”
This organization doesn’t exist.
The bureau was the creation of a white supremacist on Twitter, advancing a racist meme with a lie. Trump hasn’t taken down the tweet, apologized, or even acknowledged it.
But because of the way the Internet values its information, Donald Trump lied again, and he will once again get away with it.
Here were the headlines from mainstream outlets about Trump’s entirely made up piece of information:
“Trump Tweet on Black Crime Sets Off Firestorm,” wrote Fox News.
“Fact Checking Donald Trump’s Questionable ‘USA Crime Statistics’ Tweet Broken Down by Race,” wrote the New York Daily News.
“Trump Takes Heat for Tweet About Black Murder Rates,” wrote The Hill.
Noticeably absent from these headlines was that Donald Trump’s tweet was entirely fabricated. The Hill’s doesn’t even dig into the credibility of the statistics until the ninth paragraph.
Donald Trump lied. And yet traditional news organizations can’t or won’t call him that in the name of “objectivity”—appearing to favor one party over another—even if one candidate is spreading a rumor that unfairly maligns an entire race.
“The incentive for candidates [to lie] is that most media outlets don’t have the resources to check for accuracy immediately, but since the U.S. news media is based on the commercial model—and more eyeballs on the page or the screen is good for business—the networks love it when someone like Donald Trump says outrageous stuff,” Michelle Amazeen, an assistant communications professor at Rider University, told The Daily Beast.
“Fact-checking rains on the parade of that revenue model.”
Amazeen co-authored a study for the American Press Institute that largely had great things to say about fact-checking. Prevalent fact-checking operations like Politifact or FactCheck.org do, in fact, serve as a deterrent for candidates who are thinking about lying during an election cycle, she and her co-authors found.
But when a candidate figures out that he can say whatever he wants in order to advance a narrative and can have immediate benefits—and knowingly exploits it—all bets are off.
“Beyond being ineffective, correcting claims about a highly controversial issue can actually backfire. People who are diehard believers hold their beliefs even more firmly when those beliefs are challenged,” Amazeen wrote earlier this year in The Washington Post.
“We know that a lot of people don’t even read past the first sentence, so the initial information gets passed around and, unfortunately, there’s not much stopping them,” Amazeen told The Daily Beast. “Fact-checking is spreading, but not nearly as fast as that first information.”
As Poynter’s Craig Silverman once put it, “Initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction.”
Trump’s candidacy turned misinformation into ammunition in just four easy steps.
First, say or tweet an incorrect piece of information, knowing any network that calls you on it will be dubbed partial by one of the two political parties.
Two, watch as mainstream news outlets write about the controversy of your statements—as the right and left line up on predictable sides—but not call you out on it. The stories will often present an objective fact-check, placed with seemingly equal weight to what one of your supporters feels is true. “Objectivity” and “balance” means treating someone who is factually wrong, even lying, the same as the person who is right and honest.
Three, fire up your base when one news organization dares to disobey the second rule. Call them “biased,” “failing,” or “unfair.”
Four, watch your Q rating soar!
And Trump’s campaign is built on lies more than any other in recent memory.
“This cycle is very different with the number of flat-out wrong claims,” said Angie Drobnic-Holan, editor-in-chief of Politifact. “Some of our fact-checks are not all clear cut. Some are in the mostly true range, and that’s fine. But this year, the amount of things that did not or could not have happened? Just go through our ‘Pants On Fire’ section. You’ll see way more examples than in previous years.”
Politifact’s “Pants On Fire” designation is reserved for the most severe, unbelievable lies told by politicians on any side of the aisle.
“Take Donald Trump’s scorecard and compare it to Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney at this time [in the election cycle]. Bachmann is probably the closest parallel, because she said some very provocative things that turned out to be completely wrong,” she said. “It’s not even close. And she only won the Ames poll, then that was it. He’s different.”
Even by 2016 standards, Trump is lapping the field in “Pants On Fires.”
“Tell you what: Look at Jeb Bush’s scorecard. Look at Marco Rubio’s scorecard. Anybody’s. If you’re a politician, and you’re talking about controversial things, odds are you’ll say something wacky at some point,” she said. “But they don’t look anything like Donald Trump’s.”
On a basic human level, too, Drobnic-Holan can see how this kind of thing goes uncovered by beat reporters and mainstream media. Journalists are tired. They can’t check everything right away when they’re on deadline. But writing a story about a controversy over a piece of misinformation one already knows is untrue, and not reporting it that way?
“If you’re repeating information that you know to be wrong without letting your readers know, then you’re doing them a disservice,” she said. “That’s the most vital service we provide, don’t you think? Is that controversial?”
It shouldn’t be, but it is.
The radio silence on Trump’s lies may have a direct and lasting effect on the country, too.
“These claims get repeated down ballot,” said Amazeen. “Governors, judges, dog catchers.”
So how can we stop it?
“We need to re-examine what our news media are doing. We need to find a way to get readers to value the content,” she said.
That means driving news outlets away from placing objectively true information next to feelings about what happened in an effort to shield themselves from the ridicule of one side. That ridicule, in the current economy of the Internet, could lead to a loss of unique visitors—the thing that matters most to advertisers on the Web. News companies, one way or another, need to keep the lights on.
A better way of monetizing the news is coming (like paid subscriptions), but until then candidates like Trump can revel in a mostly controversy-first, fact-second news cycle.
“Fact checking is spreading, but not nearly as fast as the misinformation before it. This is what journalists are supposed to be doing,” said Amazeen. “Journalism has been gutted over the years because it’s not making the money that it used to make. We’ve had a hollowing out of journalism.”
Drobnic-Holan sees a better future. She says her site is being cited more frequently this time around, that there’s a real appetite for it in the 2016 race.
“I really take seriously we’re independent, that we’re not taking sides, that we’re not making a judgment on the overall candidacy of a specific candidate, just their facts,” she said. “We’re trying to provide information for voters to inform the voters, then let the process play out.”
But shouldn’t everybody be doing that? Isn’t that just what journalism is? Isn’t fact checking the whole thing—not just the eighth paragraph underneath the controversy?
“I think so. I think people are starting to see how powerful this form of journalism is,” she says. “That if a journalist’s not fact checking, they’re not doing their jobs.”
By: Ben Collins, The Daily Beast, November 24, 2015
“This Ugly Atmosphere Feels A Bit Familiar”: It’s Beginning To Feel Like 2002 All Over Again
At the end of last week, the liberal group Media Matters noted that in the wake of the Madrid bombings in March 2004, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly asserted that “If al-Qaeda attacks here, President Bush is re-elected in a heartbeat,” since “unlike the Spanish,” who are passive sheep (or something), the strong American public “won’t surrender, they’ll get angry.” But after the recent attacks in Paris, O’Reilly sang a different tune: “We get hit, [Obama] goes down as the worst president in U.S. history. No doubt.”
While Media Matters’s purpose in juxtaposing these two quotes was surely to mock O’Reilly for his partisan hypocrisy, you can look at it another, much more depressing way: O’Reilly was probably right both times.
Not about history’s judgment of Obama, obviously. But given what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, it’s becoming hard to hope that anything resembling a rational reaction to the events in Paris will take hold. As I wrote last week, Republicans are rushing to exploit the attacks in the most cynical and repugnant ways, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the real problem is that most of the public is going to eat it up.
That’s partly because of what they’re hearing from their leaders. Today’s Republicans would never consider rallying around President Obama if there were an attack in the U.S. the way Democrats did after September 11. They might gather on the Capitol steps, but it wouldn’t be to sing “God Bless America” as Democrats and Republicans did soon after the attacks; it would be to rush to the cameras to condemn Obama for having blood on his hands. Indeed, they already have; “John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all served as apologists for radical Islamic terrorism,” said Ted Cruz last week.
People of all parties take cues from their leaders, which helps explain why support for Bush was so universal in the days after 9/11, and why Republicans’ hatred of Obama only grows when they’re made to feel vulnerable to foreign threats. But today’s Republicans are harvesting fertile soils of fear and hate.
People like me can explain until we’re blue in the face that becoming a refugee to Europe is nothing like becoming a refugee to the United States, a process that can take two years; and that sneaking someone into the U.S. posing as a refugee is probably the single hardest way to get them to the U.S. (as opposed to, say, buying them a plane ticket). We can explain that the threat to you and your family’s lives from terrorism is infinitesimal (the number of Americans who have been killed in the U.S. by jihadi terrorists since 9/11—26—just happens to be the same number of Americans who have been killed by lightning in 2015 alone). But it won’t much matter.
A majority of the public opposes bringing in refugees from Syria. Americans now cite terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, though by any logical standard it most certainly is not (for instance, it takes less than two days for more Americans to die from gun violence as died in the Paris attacks). In the wake of those attacks, Donald Trump remains strongly in front in the Republican presidential primary race. As Politico reports, conservative voters in Iowa may be turning away from Ben Carson and toward Ted Cruz now that they’re thinking about terrorism. In truth, Cruz has the same amount of foreign policy experience as Carson (zero), but he’s a lot angrier about it, which seems to be the order of the day in the GOP.
Reporters have spent much of the last week or so trying to pin Trump down on whether he thinks the government should create a database that every Muslim in America would have to register with, a positively fascistic suggestion that he may or may not have been unfairly entrapped into supporting. Like everything else related to government policy, Trump obviously hasn’t given it any serious thought, but reporters are operating on the quite reasonable assumption that it would be scandalous if he actually believed such a thing. But would it?
At least in the Republican primary, where virulent xenophobia now seems to be the order of the day, the answer is probably not. Trump is now talking about putting Muslim houses of worship across the country under surveillance, Marco Rubio agrees, and most voters may find that to be utterly untroubling; after all, it’s not their freedoms being taken away. Trump also wants to begin torturing prisoners again (not that we have any ISIS prisoners), Chris Christie says he wouldn’t even allow a 5-year-old orphan from Syria into New Jersey, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush say we should only accept Christians but keep out Muslims, and Ben Carson compares refugees to rabid dogs. Nothing that any of the candidates have said since Paris suggests that there is any position they could take or thing they could say that would be regarded by their voters as beyond the pale.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that heightened fears of ISIS will sweep the Republicans into the White House next year; there’s lots of time between now and then, and other issues will grab the electorate’s attention. The American public and its political elite may not have taken leave of their senses to quite the degree they did in the months and years after September 11, when no restriction on individual liberty went far enough, no expansion of government power was too much, and invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on us seemed like the perfect way to handle our fear and anger. But the increasingly ugly atmosphere is beginning to feel awfully familiar.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 23, 2015
“It’s Out Of Control Now”: First, Donald Trump Came For The Muslims
I have never truly feared for the well-being of my family or friends because of the words uttered by an American politician. But that has changed after Donald Trump’s comments over the past few days about Muslims.
When I tell you that Trump’s remarks about what he has planned for Muslims in America if elected president are bone chilling, I’m not exaggerating. But to me the most frightening—and yes, I mean frightening—incident in all of this is what happened Saturday at Trump’s rally in Birmingham, Alabama. It was not just his words, but the way Trump conveyed them and the setting that conjured up a truly dark time in human history.
During his rally Saturday deep in the heart of Dixie, Trump told the crowd of thousands in no uncertain terms what Muslims could expect if he leads our nation. “Just to set it clear,” Trump stated, pausing slightly for dramatic effect. A sternness then came over his face as he declared emphatically: “I want surveillance of these people.”
You see to Trump, we are not your fellow Americans who are teachers, doctors, taxi drivers, member of Congress, etc. No, he has dehumanized us into a faceless group he calls “these people.” And Trump has unilaterally determined that “these people,” Muslim Americans, are not worthy of the same rights as other Americans. That we, Muslims, are less than fully American simply because of our faith.
Trump then implored the crowd to cheer for his plan that would strip the constitutional rights of a minority group in America with the call, “Are you ready for this? Are you ready?” And on cue, thousands in the crowd cheered as their leader beckoned.
Then something else happened at the event that should give all Americans pause. In this sea of adoring Trump fans stood a black man by the name of Mercutio Southall Jr., a well known local activist. Southall had been shouting “Black Lives Matters,” which had so upset Trump supporters that some began to assault him.
Trump, who later admitted that he had been annoyed with the interruptions by this black activist, can be heard bellowing out to his followers as they are assaulting Southall: “Get him the hell out of here, will you, please?” Adding, “Get him out of here. Throw him out!”
And shockingly on Sunday morning when Trump was asked on Fox News about the assault of Southall, he defended it: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
But Trump’s demonization of minorities in his quest for power didn’t begin or end on Saturday. He launched his presidential campaign in June in a way that earned him the praise of white supremacist groups for his demonization of Latino immigrants. But I’m sure Trump was already on the radar of these hate groups, which he has refused to denounce, given his infamous racist birther campaign versus President Obama.
And earlier last week, Trump commented to a reporter that he was open to creating a Muslim database and possibly even requiring Muslims to carry special ID cards.
Trump has also doubled down in the past few days on his pledge to order warrantless spying on Muslim Americans and even to close down American mosques. This is no different than racial profiling of Latinos and blacks and it’s no less unconstitutional.
Trump, however, was not done with his Muslim bashing. In fact, he upped it Saturday by claiming that “thousands and thousands” of Arabs and Muslims in New Jersey were cheering as the World Trade Center came down on 9/11. This is a lie. And that’s not a matter of opinion, it’s fact. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos challenged Trump on Sunday, telling the GOP’s leading candidate point blank that the “police say it didn’t happen.” Yet Trump refused to back down, claiming he saw this on television 14 years ago.
The bigger question here is why Trump would even bring up this incident that occurred more than 14 years ago? How is it relevant to the key issues in the 2016 presidential campaign? It’s not. It simply plays well with the GOP base. In fact, just a few days before Trump began his jihad versus Muslims, a poll was released finding that three-quarters of Republicans think Islam is “at odds” with American values. Trump’s demonization of Muslims, as well as other minority groups, is simply part of his strategy to achieve power.
Thankfully, we have seen a cross section of Americans pushing back against Trump’s hate. Therein lies the silver lining. On the claim that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated after 9/11, numerous elected official from the Garden State have made it clear that Trump is absolutely wrong. These include the current mayor of Jersey City and longtime New Jersey State Sen. Raymond Lesniak, who tweeted bluntly: “To Trump: Stop your inflammatory lies about Americans.”
Even the Anti Defamation League (ADL) swiftly condemned Trump, telling BuzzFeed that Trump is “giving new life to long-debunked conspiracy theories about 9/11.” The ADL dubbed it a “a variation of the anti-Semitic myth that a group of Israelis were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers fell.”
And many on social media made it clear that if Trump ever required American Muslims to register with the government, they would too, even they weren’t Muslim. One of the most moving shows of support came from Rabbi Joshua Stanton, a man who says he tries to avoid politics, but still felt compelled to pen a touching article titled, “Register Me, Too, Mr. Trump.”
The GOP is at a crossroads that will define its party for years. They can nominate Trump, a man who has demonized American minority groups, or choose someone who truly embraces American values. But if Trump is the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, they will have made it clear to America that the Grand Old Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, but the party of hate.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, November 23, 2015
“The GOP’s Islamic State Bluster”: As Far As The GOP Field Is Concerned, Generosity Of Spirit Is For Losers
The impact of the Paris attacks on the Republican presidential race may turn out to be minimal, especially since the establishment candidates aren’t making any more sense than outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Theoretically, a deadly rampage by Islamic State terrorists ought to make Republican voters think twice about presidential hopefuls who have zero experience in government and no expertise in foreign or military affairs. But the contenders who hold or held high office are offering little more than bellicose rhetoric and overblown pledges of toughness.
Not that it’s easy to match Trump for hyperbole. “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country,” he said on Twitter. “Who knows who they are — some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?”
But Chris Christie, who should know better, went not just over the top but around the bend. He said all Syrian refugees should be turned away, including “orphans under 5.” As governor of New Jersey, maybe he’ll order a security sweep of the Garden State’s elementary school playgrounds.
For the record, Syrian refugees are not “pouring” into the United States. There’s hardly even a trickle: Since the civil war began, slightly more than 2,000 refugees have been admitted. Compare our meager total with the estimated 2 million Syrians taking refuge in Turkey or the hundreds of thousands flooding into Europe. Boosting the number to 10,000 over the next year, as Obama plans, would still mean that the U.S. contribution to alleviating one of the worst refugee crises since World War II doesn’t amount to a drop in the bucket. I could describe in detail the lengthy pre-entry vetting process, which can take up to two years, but why bother? As far as the GOP field is concerned, generosity of spirit is for losers.
Carson’s response to the Islamic State is, unsurprisingly, vague and off-the-wall. He wrote an op-ed in The Post calling for a military strategy virtually identical to President Obama’s, augmented by “a multi-pronged communications strategy that leverages our strengths in media production and messaging, combined with cutting off traditional access routes to social media for radical Islamist groups.” He seems to mean we should create a really cool smartphone app.
But Marco Rubio, too, called for a dramatic escalation in social-media warfare. He said Sunday that “where we strike them, we capture or kill their leaders, we videotape the operations, we publicize them, because this is a group that heavily uses propaganda to attract fighters and donors from around the world.” And John Kasich proposed a new government agency to promote “Judeo-Christian Western values” to the world.
Lindsey Graham had the best response to Kasich’s brainstorm: “I think that was the Crusades.”
Jeb Bush, the ultimate establishment candidate, seemed to sense both opportunity and peril. “The United States should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force,” he said in a speech Wednesday. “Militarily, we need to intensify our efforts in the air — and on the ground.”
Coming from anyone else, those words might strike Republican voters as tough and sober. Coming from a candidate named Bush, however, they could portend a geopolitical blunder of historic proportions. Perhaps that is why Bush is vague on how many U.S. ground troops he would send and what they would do, saying he would rely on the judgment of the professional soldiers advising him.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because all the establishment GOP candidates pledge to rely on the generals to tell them how many troops to send. Obama says he follows the generals’ counsel, too.
Rogue candidate Trump, of course, needs no advice. He says he will “bomb the [expletive] out of [ISIS],” applauds the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing the same and vows to destroy the oil fields that provide much of the Islamic State’s wealth.
He says all of this in typically bombastic fashion. His claim that he will “win” by sheer force of personality is deeply unserious. But the actual policies he rants about may resonate with GOP voters: Rely on air power, get other countries to put troops on the ground, take no chances with refugees, talk really tough.
Two new polls of New Hampshire Republicans, conducted since the Paris attacks by WBUR of Boston and Fox News, show that Rubio may be doing a little better in that state and Carson a little worse. But Trump remains far ahead of the pack. Plus ça change.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 19, 2015
“Where’s The Cool-Down Switch On This Thing?”: The Apocalyptic Mind-Set That Has Developed Among Republicans
Krugman is, as usual, right: the hysteria level among Republicans at present is just out of control. You imagine them examining their own bodies for a cool-down switch or maybe plunging themselves into cold bathwater periodically.
[W]e shouldn’t really be surprised, because we’ve seen this movie before (unless we were too scared to go to the theater). Remember the great Ebola scare of 2014? The threat of a pandemic, like the threat of a terrorist attack, was real. But it was greatly exaggerated, thanks in large part to hype from the same people now hyping the terrorist danger.
What’s more, the supposed “solutions” were similar, too, in their combination of cruelty and stupidity. Does anyone remember Mr. Trump declaring that “the plague will start and spread” in America unless we immediately stopped all plane flights from infected countries? Or the fact that Mitt Romney took a similar position? As it turned out, public health officials knew what they were doing, and Ebola quickly came under control — but it’s unlikely that anyone on the right learned from the experience.
What explains the modern right’s propensity for panic? Part of it, no doubt, is the familiar point that many bullies are also cowards. But I think it’s also linked to the apocalyptic mind-set that has developed among Republicans during the Obama years.
Think about it. From the day Mr. Obama took office, his political foes have warned about imminent catastrophe. Fiscal crisis! Hyperinflation! Economic collapse, brought on by the scourge of health insurance! And nobody on the right dares point out the failure of the promised disasters to materialize, or suggest a more nuanced approach.
Given this context, it’s only natural that the right would seize on a terrorist attack in France as proof that Mr. Obama has left America undefended and vulnerable. Ted Cruz, who has a real chance of becoming the Republican nominee, goes so far as to declare that the president “does not wish to defend this country.”
The context also explains why Beltway insiders were so foolish when they imagined that the Paris attacks would deflate Donald Trump’s candidacy, that Republican voters would turn to establishment candidates who are serious about national security.
Who, exactly, are these serious candidates? And why would the establishment, which has spent years encouraging the base to indulge its fears and reject nuance, now expect that base to understand the difference between tough talk and actual effectiveness?
Sure enough, polling since the Paris attack suggests that Mr. Trump has actually gained ground.
And why shouldn’t he? The entire GOP field has been moving in his direction on this inflammable “Issue” of immigration linked to terrorism. The Republican Establishment types who have regarded the Trump candidacy as summer entertainment for the hoi polloi before they settle down to do their duty to the party by nominating Jeb have never really understood Trump’s appeal. All they can do now is mimic his rhetoric.
By: Ed Kilgore, Senior Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 20, 2015
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