Fake News

Falsehood, Fabrication and Fantasy in Journalism

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351392884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Fake News: Falsehood, fabrication and fantasy in journalism examines the causes and consequences of the 'fake news' phenomenon now sweeping the world's media and political debates. Drawing on three decades of research and writing on journalism and news media, the author engages with the fake news phenomenon in accessible, insightful language designed to bring clarity and context to a complex and fast-moving debate.

The author presents fake news not as a cultural issue in isolation but rather as arising from, and contributing to, significant political and social trends in twenty-first century societies. Chapters identify the factors which have laid the groundwork for fake news' explosive appearance at this moment in our globalised public sphere. These include the rise of relativism and the crisis of objectivity, the role of digital media platforms in the production and consumption of news, and the growing drive to produce online content which attracts users and generates revenue.

1
#FakeNews

JIM ACOSTA (Cnn) Mr. President-elect, can you give us a question?

DONALD TRUMP: No I’m not going to give you a question. You’re fake news.

(Media conference by the President-elect, Washington, D.C., January 11, 2017)

Donald Trump’s first media conference as president-elect was a much-anticipated event, given his previous record of controversial, often outrageous, declarations about all manner of individuals, groups, countries and policies. Despite his description of Mexicans as “rapists” and his promise to build a big beautiful wall to keep them out of America; despite found footage in which he boasts of being able as a famous person to “grab’em [women] by the pussy”;¹ despite mocking a disabled journalist and verbally abusing both Democratic and Republican opponents at rallies of frenzied supporters, Trump had emerged triumphant over ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton in the November election and was now preparing to assume office.

He had abused the media too during his campaign, organisations and individual journalists alike (not just the disabled ones), as “liars” and the purveyors of “fake news” (Fox News’ Sean Hannity later referred to “the very fake news media, they want to destroy Trump”).² They were a “cancer” in the body of American politics, Trump said, the most “dishonest people” ever. Now that he was elected, the mainstream news media speculated, surely he would have to moderate his tone and win friends in the Washington press corps if he were to achieve his stated goal of uniting the country and ‘making America great again’. Instead, at his first press conference after his November victory he attacked the media pack with even greater ferocity, and CNN’s Jim Acosta was his first target (having previously been singled out by Trump for special attention during the campaign). “You’re fake news”, he repeated and moved on to another correspondent.³

CNN was in good company, because Trump around this time made the same ‘fake news’ accusation about media organisations as widely respected for their journalism as the BBC,⁴ the New York Times, the Washington Post and MSNBC. Any news provider, indeed, that published journalism of which Trump disapproved was liable to be branded as ‘fake’. (This was a strategy which continued through the first year of his presidency. Journalists who reported the documented meeting between Donald Trump Jr.and assorted Russians in June 2016 were branded as “sick”, for example.)

Mr Trump himself was regularly accused of deploying fake news stories against his political opponents in the presidential campaign – for example, by implying that the father of rival Republican candidate Ted Cruz was possibly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy because he had once been photographed with Lee Harvey Oswald.⁵ At his first public rally after his election, Trump referred with apparently sincere incredulity to an incident that had happened “last night in Sweden”. In the context of a typically fierce monologue against those he regarded as soft on Islamism, he implied that by being too liberal in its acceptance of refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East, Sweden had invited an attack on its values.

We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden? Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible.⁶

Reporters and commentators covering the rally were confused because, in fact, there had been no migrant-related incident of note that particular night in Sweden. What was he referring to, asked the media? The Swedish ambassador to the United States made a formal protest.

It emerged over the next couple of days that the president had acquired his information about “last night in Sweden” third hand from a Fox News item about a documentary on Sweden’s policy on migration and Islamic integration. The documentary maker, Ami Horowitz, was interviewed by Fox anchor Tucker Carlson (replacing Bill Reilly after the latter’s departure from the channel under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations) during an item about Trump’s then-struggling signature policy of banning entry from some Muslim-majority countries into the United States. The interview explored the fact that Sweden – what Horowitz called in the interview a “human rights superpower” – was experiencing an “absolute rise in gun violence and rape” since refugees from the Middle East began to come in to the country in greater numbers.⁷ He also accused the Swedish government of “covering up some of these problems”, including “mass rape at rock concerts”, and went on to describe how luxuriously refugees and migrants in Sweden were able to live under the country’s generous welfare and benefits regime.

These may or may not be legitimate observations for a journalist to make about recent trends in Sweden, but there was no reference in Horowitz’ interview to an incident happening that night. What appears to have occurred, one might charitably speculate – Trump himself later conceded this to have been the case, and given his self-avowed preference for Rupert Murdoch’s cable channel as a news source, who could doubt it? – is that the new president simply jumbled up his words and instead of saying ‘last night on Fox News, there was this item about how things have been going in Sweden’, he gave the clear impression that there had been an actual incident involving Muslim migrants, one sufficiently serious to lend support to his controversial policy on the future handling of Muslims entering America (specifically, to ban entrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries on the grounds that they were a national security risk). Not fake news, he might have said, but news that got a bit mixed up in the heat of an emotional speech to his fans; not disinformation, but mistaken information from a man well known for verbally shooting from the hip without regard to facts, evidence or the traditional conventions of elite political speech.

The story became an exemplar of ‘fake news’ in any case, and even when it was revealed to be – at best – deeply misleading, the president made no attempt to publicly correct the impression he had given of a Sweden – and by extension, a western Europe which had naively accepted large numbers of Muslim migrants into its midst – under assault from Islamist extremists.

Fortuitously for him, there was a disturbance involving migrant youths in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby the night after the comments were made, but because not even his most fervent followers believe that Donald Trump can see the future before it happens – do they? – this was entirely unconnected to the “last night in Sweden” claim. Trump nonetheless claimed the disturbance as vindication of his broader point about the risks of excessive immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

As it happened, the author was visiting the University of Stockholm in the very week that this story broke and went around the world virally with the hashtag #lastnightinsweden and was able to speak to journalism students and others about the accuracy or otherwise of the Horowitz documentary. One student described Horowitz as a “far right documentary maker”, and a glance at his Wikipedia page lists a series of gonzo-like provocations designed to manufacture confrontations with (mainly) ‘liberal’ groups with whom he disagrees. His Swedish documentary was later criticised by those involved in its making, including two of the policemen quoted in it, for being inaccurate and misleading.⁸

In Horowitz’ defence, and maybe Trump’s too, there are undoubtedly challenges around the integration of so many migrants into Sweden and other European countries in such a short time. Douglas Murray notes that in 2015 alone, Sweden received 163,000 asylum seekers, and that the percentage of non-European migrants in the population increased by some 500% between 1990 and 2016 (from 3% to 14%) (2016). As with all waves of migration, from wherever they come and to whatever country they go, tensions can easily arise between incomers and the host population, particularly when there are significant differences of culture to be managed (such as those around the legitimacy of women’s rights and homosexuality – both topics in which Sweden has been a global pioneer). Policymakers must be skilful in handling issues such as the allocation of social housing, education and other public resources, especially in the current era of widespread austerity and budget cutbacks being experienced in many European countries. Many commentators believe that the Leave vote in the UK’s EU referendum was generated largely by lower-income groups, including many traditional Labour supporters, who resent what they see as the insensitive and unjust placing of large numbers of refugees in their already struggling communities, where housing and other services are under strain.

It cannot be disputed that some of these migrants have brought what most liberal Europeans would regard as reactionary and disturbing beliefs and values to Sweden, as they have elsewhere. The Uber driver who took me to Stockholm’s airport on my departure explained that he himself was a migrant who had come to Sweden from Iraq many years ago. He told me that he was a Jew who had fled anti-Semitic persecution and built a new life with his family in Stockholm. He spoke several languages and was perhaps an example of what successful integration in a modern liberal democracy looks like. We discussed the “last night in Sweden” controversy, and he described how many of the young Muslim taxi drivers he had occasion to meet were openly anti-Semitic and that he himself had been called “a dirty Jew” by one young migrant taxi driver from Somalia. These young men were also deeply misogynistic, he added, routinely denouncing the native Swedish women they observed all around them as sluts and worse for their liberal attitudes to female sexuality. This man, himself a migrant, went so far as to express agreement with Donald Trump’s policies on migration from Islamic countries.

The effect of this anecdote, for me – and I had no reason not to believe what he said – was to strengthen the view that for all that Trump has been criticised, mocked and feared for his extreme policies and words, it is wrong for his critics to ignore or avoid the underlying phenomena into which he and his followers tap or to dismiss all of their claims as ‘fake news’. In the case of #lastnightinsweden, notwithstanding the bizarre circumstances in which the new president made his assertion, it is just as much of a mistake to suggest that there are no migration-related problems in Stockholm as it is to believe that the liberal democracies are under threat of annihilation by hordes of bomb-toting jihadis. An article in the Brisbane Times discussed competing perceptions of the challenges migration has posed to Sweden, observing that

No one doubts immigration, terrorism and sexual violence are real issues in the country. In fact, they are issues helping fuel the rise of the country’s far-right party in the polls. But the claim that liberal democracies like Sweden are somehow unable to cope with these, or any 21st century challenge, is not true.⁹

That there is a real issue of how to manage the presence of Muslims in secular, liberal democracies, migrants or otherwise – a small minority of whom are radical Islamists who despise and in extreme cases are prepared to murder their hosts on religious grounds (in the UK following the Manchester Arena and London Borough Market atrocities, there were estimated to be some 25,000 of them, including 3,000 under active surveillance¹⁰) – was tragically demonstrated in Stockholm just a few weeks later on April 17 when a rejected asylum seeker from Uzbekistan drove a commandeered truck into shoppers, killing five and wounding fifteen. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, and the perpetrator had reportedly joined the movement after arriving in Sweden.

Let me suggest at the outset that although, like the rise of populism with which it is associated, the impact of fake news is potentially hugely damaging to democratic political cultures, the phenomenon has roots in real trends which the liberal opponents of Mr Trump’s populism are dangerously mistaken to deny or downplay. As we shall see later, liberal and left observers – including scholars of media and journalism – have spent decades denouncing the biases and fabrications of mainstream capitalist media. Esteemed intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas, drawing upon materialist, Marxist theories of hegemonic class domination through culture, have indeed made their reputations out of such critiques. Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ for understanding the behaviour of western news media remains hugely influential (Chomsky and Herman, 1978).¹¹ The political and academic left, it is fair to say, has in many countries seen the mainstream media as servants of the ruling class to be countered at every opportunity. It is ironic that many of those same voices are now vigorously defending the likes of the New York Times and the BBC against Trump’s ongoing campaign to define them as sick, dishonest, pro-elite, anti–working people purveyors of ‘fake news’.

The birth of a meme

By early 2017, as the Trump presidency commenced, the term ‘fake news’ had become ubiquitous in the globalised public sphere. Everywhere one looked, in all manner of journalistic and political contexts, it popped up as shorthand for journalism that should not be taken seriously because it was false, fabricated or little better than fiction. As Figure 1.1 shows, references to the term in media coverage indexed by Factiva went from pra...