Look, I want to see an honest press. When I started off today by saying that it’s so important to the public to get an honest press. The press—the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know.
—Donald Trump, Feb. 16, 2017
A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter.
Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.
—Washington Post article, July 12, 2017
MAY 23, 2017: The annual fundraising dinner for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is a galaxy away from the evangelical tent revivals that I saw pass through my tiny hometown as a small boy in Illinois, setting up in the midst of the soybean fields and calling the faithful to come together and believe on sweaty August nights. The RCFP doesn’t do tents and fields. It prefers the elegant Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. The crowd is dressed up. The alcohol flows. The waiters are in tuxes. Its religion is not born-again Christianity but freedom of the press. But in its way it is a spiritual twin to the events in those worn tents of those Illinois summers, a chance for the faithful to gather, to leave the doubting world behind and commune with fellow believers, certain of the righteousness of their common cause.
Dear Lord, did we need that in the spring of 2017.
The world beyond the Pierre and New York City often seemed like a hostile place to be a journalist, or to believe that the press was a force for good, or to think that press freedom was actually something worth preserving. Inside, no one suffered from doubt. Everyone believed. The spirit was replenished. “It’s so nice to be in a crowd this big with people who think like me,” a woman told me. It was in every sense a revival.
I was scheduled to give a five-minute talk to the faithful somewhere deep in the program that evening. I had come across a statistic that was making the rounds from the Gallup polling operation: “Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately and fairly’ has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.” I found the statistic absurd. I laid waste to it that night in my remarks:
Of course the question I get asked most often these days is What to do? What to do—when we have an administration that declares the working press to be the enemy of the American people, that thinks it’s OK to exclude reporters it dislikes from press conferences, that bridles at the thought that reporters might actually believe that facts matter, and that longs for a country where journalists can go to jail for publishing the truth.
If you are a journalist, the answer is simple: keep doing what you are doing. For all the toxic noise coming out of the White House, I do not see journalists silencing themselves, I do not see journalists backing off. What I see is journalists asking the right questions, writing tough stories, doing what they have always done—helping the American people understand what is being done in their name.
Yes, I have seen the polls showing that only 32 percent of the American people answer yes when asked whether they trust the “mass media”—whatever “mass media” means today. TMZ or The Financial Times? Fox News or MSNBC? My local paper or Breitbart News? It’s like this: Have you ever asked a 13-year-old boy, “How was school today?” There is only one respectable answer: “It sucked.” And it is the same deal here. Ask any self-respecting, freedom-loving, institution-hating Americans a big stupid unanswerable question about what they think of the “mass media.” Of course they are going to say, “It sucks.”
The room loved the remarks—applause, laughter, lots of rah-rah. Which was nice. You want that at a revival. You want to connect with the believers. Except I had serious doubts about whether I was right. Maybe we did need to pay attention to the polls.
I would study the poll results over the course of 2017 as Donald Trump invited the country to dismiss the mainstream media as biased hacks serving heaping platters of fake news. Maybe the Gallup question was silly, a throwback to a time when the term “mass media” meant something to people, but no poll was cutting us much slack. I stumbled upon a Politico/Morning Consult poll that shredded the idea that all the right-wing bluster about “fake news” was just a lot of howling in the political night. The poll showed that 46 percent of voters believed that news organizations made up fake news stories about the Trump administration. Only 37 percent disagreed, with another 17 percent still trying to make up their minds. The Republican numbers were off the chart and not in a good way: More than 75 percent of the GOP voters were convinced that the media published fake news. Even 20 percent of the Democrats agreed.
In December 2017, the Poynter Media Trust Survey—which, as it turned out, probably should have been called the Poynter Media Distrust Survey—was almost as grim. Asked whether news organizations fabricated stories “more than once in a while,” 44 percent of Americans answered yes. Poynter broke out the numbers: 24 percent said the fabrications occurred “about half of the time,” and 14 percent weighed in with “most of the time.” Maybe we were to take as good news that only 6 percent voted for “all of the time.”
People in the media tried to dredge up some actual good news in the polls. It wasn’t easy. There was the Reuters/Ipsos poll from September 2017. At first blush, that offered a glimmer of hope. The number of people saying they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press was, yes, on the rise—all the way up to 48 percent from 39 percent over the course of a 10-month period following the election. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press had dropped. That number had gone to 45 percent from 51 percent. It was easy for us in the press to latch onto the way the numbers were moving—we were making progress with the public—but you could only get there if you ignored what the poll actually showed: close to half the people still had no trust in the press.
We all knew the standard lines about what was wrong with the surveys. The disapproval numbers masked and oversimplified reactions. In some surveys, those who thought the press was too soft on Trump ended up pushed into the same number as those who thought the press was out to get him. Many people told pollsters they did not trust the media but then went out into the world relying unflinchingly on what they had just read and saw. And the questions tended to treat the press as one big monolith: from Fox News to NPR, from The New York Times to the (truly) failing local newspaper.
But that was just quibbling. The pattern was unmistakable. There was a fight taking place in the country for the hearts and minds of the public, a nationwide reckoning about what the press was going to be in American society. For those of us who were media lawyers, who had spent our professional lives looking out for press freedom in courtrooms and finding protection in judges’ opinions, the dawning of this new reality was unsettling, and for good reason: none of it was about the law exactly. In most ways, the law protecting press freedom had never been stronger. We had won in 1964 in Times v. Sullivan, and we had kept winning. But that history somehow seemed almost beside the point. What this was about was something more basic: a concerted effort to undermine the standing and status of a free press in American democracy. The law can do only so much. It can give the press the freedom to matter but it can’t make the press matter. Whether the press counted, whether it had a role to play, depended in the end on the will of the people. It doesn’t really matter how much freedom the press has in a society if the press is not believed. A distrusted press is little different from a shackled press: It lacks the authority to mobilize public opinion against wrongdoing, corruption, and misguided policy. It has no voice to hold governments accountable. It gets ignored. And I was pretty sure that at some point a disregard for the press would translate into a disregard for the law of press freedom.
It was not a good sign that public outrage was almost nonexistent over Trump’s threat to use—misuse—the power of the federal government to punish news organizations that failed to fall in line behind him. He suggested that NBC’s broadcast licenses should be pulled, that The Washington Post should register as a lobbyist because it was owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and that the Justice Department should refuse to approve a merger sought by CNN’s parent, Time Warner—as if the federal government were just an apparatus to address the president’s personal grievances (as opposed to, say, dealing with every American justly).
Whether we liked it or not, Trump had hit a nerve with his attacks on the press. The disorienting part was that there was in fact a fake news problem in America. Actually, there were two. One was the real fake news problem—the polluting of the political ecosystem through social media with intentionally false stories designed to mislead and divide. The other was the fake fake news problem—the deployment of the term “fake news” to undermine and delegitimize those news organizations that dared to raise questions about the Trump administration.
The president was right, of course, that The Times, CNN, and the rest of the mainstream media and their new digital rivals made mistakes. Nothing new about that. CNN retracted a story saying that a Trump ally had met with the head of a Russian investment fund. (CNN accepted the resignations of three journalists responsible for the mistake.) ABC’s Brian Ross got it wrong when he reported that Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with the Russians before the election. (Ross was suspended for four weeks.) A Washington Post reporter posted a photo on Twitter that suggested a Trump rally had failed to draw a big crowd when in fact the photo was taken before the event started. (The reporter took the tweet down in 20 minutes and apologized.) The Times stumbled when we did an article saying that the administration was trying to squelch a climate change report when, as we learned too late, the report had already been made public on a website. (A clarification followed.) The reasons for those and other errors were many: plain old mental lapses, mistaken sources, sloppy editing, a failure to be thorough, a blindness that sometimes takes hold in the pursuit of a good story. Here is one thing that was not a reason: willful fabrication. The notion that the errors were intentional made no sense if you thought about it for a minute. The stories were too public. The public scrutiny too inevitable. The corrections too quick and too prominent. The competition too ready to call out the mistakes of a rival news outlet. Nobody in the mainstream press was trying to get away with a deliberate falsehood.
In other words, the president’s claim of fake news in the mainstream media was itself fake news.
In 2017, The Times jumped into the fray over truth and falsity with a series of TV and internet advertisements on the theme “Truth Is Hard.” In April, a set of ads featured the gripping photojournalism that The Times had done about the refugee crisis in Europe, the Ebola scare in Africa, the desperate times in Venezuela, and the war against ISIS. The ads ended with the taglines: “The truth is hard/the truth is hard to know/the truth is more important than ever.” Later that month, I was asked to help with a new commercial that was to focus on government secrecy and The Times’s efforts to overcome it. The idea was to have it up to mark the 100th day of the Trump administration. The marketing department wanted to know whether I had some redacted government documents from our regular battles with the federal government over our right to get documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The commercial-makers needed a visual element.
They had come to the right place. I had my own personal stockpile of redacted documents. I was generally known as a connoisseur of redaction, having fought more or less daily with federal agencies over documents that our reporters wanted. FOIA is a world unto itself. In theory, reporters write sensible requests for documents, send the requests to an agency, and the agency responds by delivering the documents. It does work that way, on occasion. But, more often, the government bureaucracy takes weeks or months or years to consider the requests and then produces page after page of documents that have huge portions blacked out because the government claims that information cannot be legally released. My collection of redacted documents was impressive. I had a page from the FBI that had every word redacted except the word “propaganda” at the end of a line about two-thirds of the way down. I had a page received in response to a FOIA request to the Justice Department that came back with only the words “approved for public release” visible at the top. A request for a booklet of photos from the army was met with the production of a version of the booklet that blocked out many of the photos but left the captions. One particularly artistic redaction involved a governmental chart that was completely redacted except one cell in the dead center of the chart—and that cell was blank—creating the world’s first doughnut-shaped redaction, albeit a rectangular doughnut.
The work on the commercial was not without its ironies. One of the companies assisting in the production had heard enough of the president’s rants about suing everyone and everything and insisted on being assured that The Times would cover any legal expenses they might incur “for any and all claims arising from use of political references in the spot and any related materials.” It was tempting to explain to the heads of the production company that they may have missed something, that the ad campaign was about the freedom to speak up without fear, that being able to speak up was the Big Idea behind America. That was why we were doing the campaign. That was the message we were going to deliver. They still wanted to be indemnified.
Then there was the actual making of the ad. Mark Mazzetti of our Washington bureau was doing the voiceover. The narrative was supposed to highlight the paper’s battles with the Trump administration over secrecy. There was plenty of that to go around, even though the administration had barely had 100 days to get the hang of it. The White House visitor logs, which had previously been made public, were now kept under lock and key. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, had objected to having a pool of reporters on the plane with him for a foreign trip, an accommodation that had been standard practice in prior administrations. Sean Spicer had had his moment in the darkness, skirmishing with the press over his closed-down super-gaggle. The long-promised release of the Trump tax returns was all promise, no reality. There was just one problem: none of the redacted documents I possessed had anything to do with the Trump administration. They were all from earlier FOIA fights during the Obama and Bush administrations. The Trump administration was too new to have engaged in seriously ridiculous redactions (something that time would soon cure). Mark and I worried that the spot created a misimpression and left us open to criticism. It struck us as bad form to do an advertisement devoted to “the truth is hard” if the ad in question was, well, not quite the truth. Call us old school. We raised our objections, and script changes were made. “Secrecy in government is not something that came around this year,” the spot now began. “We have seen secrecy grow across the years, over several administrations of two different parties.”
We weren’t alone among our peers in trying to make the case to the public that the truth mattered—hard as it was to believe that the point even needed to be made. Everyone struggled to find the right tone and message. The Washington Post wielded a sledgehammer when it posted its new slogan on its home page: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” CNN preferred the subtle and high concept—very high concept. It opted for a TV ad that featured the picture of an apple. “This is an apple,” a disembodied voice announced. “Some people might try to tell you it’s a banana. They might scream ‘Banana, banana, banana,’ over and over and over again. They might put ‘banana’ in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it’s not. This is an apple.” It was part of a campaign with the slogan “Facts First.” NPR urged listeners to support “fact-based journalism” as if there were some other station down the dial offering fantasy-based journalism.
I knew it was important to drive home the message in sound bites, but that was also part of the problem. Trump had made the term “fake news” the ultimate political sound bite—magic words able to replace real thinking. The dark beauty of it was that it had the ring of something that someone would say while deep in the pursuit of truth. If only. Denouncing a story on CNN or in The Times as “fake news” is not embracing the truth. It is just the opposite. It is asking people to skip over the analytical step of weighing what is true and what is not and instead prodding them to simply dismiss what they don’t like hearing. Trump did not try to hide that very much: “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,” he tweeted once. Not surprisingly, as Karen Greenberg pointed out in The New Republic, a 65-year-old book sold out on Amazon in the days immediately after the election. It was The Origins of Totalitarianism by the social critic Hanna Arendt. One of Arendt’s themes was what Greenberg described as the “vacuum of unthinkingness”—the danger that comes “when it no longer matters to the populace whether something is true or not, only whether it is useful.” Unthink about that for a while.
Meanwhile, the real fake news problem harming America was going on and on with no end in sight. In the aftermath of the election, we learned just how much the political ecosystem had been bombarded by intentionally fabricated stories, often disguised as real news articles, posted by a small army of online users. Some were part of the Russian disinformation campaign. Some were political partisans looking to harm their enemies. Some were just guys out to make a buck, many hunkered down in places like Macedonia, others closer to home.
Just before the inauguration, Scott Shane of The Times chronicled the fake news adventures of a guy named Cameron Harris. Nothing stood out about Harris. He was a recent college graduate living in Maryland with a passion for Republican politics. He saw on video a Trump speech from Ohio in which the candidate said he was hearing more and more about how the Democrats were trying to rig the election. Harris sprang into fake news action. Sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment, he crafted a fake story headlined “BREAKING: Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Clinton Votes Found in Ohio Warehouse.” It appeared on a fake news site called ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. The picture illustrating the piece—showing stacks of ballot boxes in storage—had been pilfered from a story about a U.K. election on an English news site. Harris posted the story and within days it had been shared with six million internet users. Ohio officials, alarmed by the allegations, launched an investigation into voter fraud. Harris ultimately earned $22,000 in ad revenues for the 20 hours he invested in fabricating and posting the article.
It had been a dizzying campaign season for the wizards of fake news. Buzzfeed reported that more than 960,000 Facebook users recommended a story about the Pope’s endorsement of Donald Trump. A half million people had shared a story blasting out that an FBI agent involved in the Hillary Clinton email case was found dead, the victim of a murder-suicide. The phony stories were not all Trump-centric. Hundreds of thousands of online users saw an article about how Ireland was accepting refugees from the United States in a special program for those fleeing the Trump administration. Others identified by Buzzfeed went after familiar themes and the old favorites of the grocery store tabloids: the death of Willie Nelson, Bill Clinton’s filing of divorce papers, the replacement of the Jefferson Davis statue in New Orleans with one of Barack Obama. A lot of traffic made its way to a story that fell into the venerable category of “too good to be true but how I wish”: it was a thrilling account of a woman who won the lottery and then got arrested for defecating on her boss’s desk.
The research on the impact of fake news was inconclusive—people are complex when it comes to how they read, how much they read, what they remember, and how they make decisions like what candidate to vote for—but nobody thought that it was helping democracy to have a world in which it was more difficult than ever to decide what to believe. Facebook’s initial reaction to the scandal of fake news was to act as if it had nothing to do with the problem, like the driver who slams on his brakes setting off a 100-car chain reaction crash behind him, then drives away looking in his rearview mirror, wondering what happened and why there are so many bad drivers on the road. Over time, Facebook got religion and started proposing initiatives to deal with the problem, making it less likely that random fake news posts ended up in people’s news feeds and trying to flag fake news, but whether technological solutions would really work was not readily apparent.
And the legal solutions? If there were laws or lawsuits that could clean up all that duplicity on social media, nobody seemed to know exactly what they would be. It was natural in America to look to lawyers to try to fix a problem. It’s in our genes. We litigate over coffee spills and sports tickets and hurt feelings. Were the courts and the legal profession really doomed to stand by idly while fake news chewed away at the fabric of democracy? The answer was, in all of its sad likelihood, yes. Here was the legal problem with fake news: It was just fake. It didn’t defame anyone. It didn’t defraud anyone out of money. It didn’t misrepresent a product for sale. It was just lies. That was where Xavier Alvarez came in, and the lawyers went out.
No man in America has ever done more to protect the right to lie. Alvarez was a habitual liar. He claimed to have played in the National Hockey League. He said he was once married to a movie star. He told people he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in combat. All of that was untrue, just brazen, self-aggrandizing lying. As it turns out, though, falsely claiming to be a military medal winner is not just a lie; it’s a federal crime. Alvarez managed to get himself prosecuted and convicted in federal court after he bragged about his Medal of Honor during a public meeting of a local government body in California. He took his case to the Supreme Court in 2012, carrying the banner for everyone who believed that among the sacred rights that we all possess as Americans is the right to tell big fat lies. The Supreme Court agreed. The court found that his lie was protected by the First Amendment. In the words of the court, America did not need its government to be a Ministry of Truth, sorting out what was false and what was true. The law under which he was prosecuted could not stand in the face of the First Amendment.
Alvarez’s case took on special meaning early in 2016, just as the primary season was heating up. A federal appeals court used the decision to strike down an Ohio law that made it illegal to tell lies about a candidate during election campaigns. Somebody wondered whether the court feared that the law would lead to prison overcrowding, but the real issue was the First Amendment again. The court found much not to like about the Ohio law: it was too ambiguous in too many ways, about what constituted a lie, about how lying was to be policed. It seemed unlikely that any legislature anywhere could write an anti-lying law that would survive a First Amendment challenge.
This was the American deal, as maddening as it was at times: the same First Amendment that had done so much to protect the speech rights of those intent on strengthening democracy also protected those who were attacking it. The message from the courts was clear: If political falsehoods were a problem, the solution in America was not more laws or more lawsuits. The remedy was the American people. It was up to them to speak up for the truth, to challenge the falsehoods, to convince others of what the facts were. It was the classic philosophical premise of a marketplace of ideas: if truth and falsity could freely compete for the public’s attention, truth would ultimately win out, with no intervention needed from the government or the law.
That was how it was supposed to work, at least. It was hard in 2016 and 2017 not to have a few doubts. Facebook revealed that content generated by Russian agents reached 126 million users on Facebook alone. The Russians also managed to post more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and 1,000 YouTube videos. Somebody in Moscow was plainly betting that in the marketplace of ideas, falsity had a decent shot of coming out on top.
Meanwhile, the other fake news problem—the use of the term by the president to undermine the independent press—continued unabated. The “fake news” label got used so often and so stupidly that it became, in time, almost a laugh line. One day I was in a gift shop, and there between the handcrafted wooden cheese platters and the artsy dish towels was a stack of pennants emblazoned with the words “FAKE NEWS” in white lettering on black, as if it were somebody’s favorite college football team, about to go head-to-head in a big game against the archrival REAL NEWS. But as much as I wanted to discount all the screeching about fake news as just so much noise, I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that all of Trump’s trashing of the press had a darker side. Around the country, during the campaign and after, isolated incidents kept popping up with a common theme: Reporters were being abused for doing their jobs. A Trump aide assaulted a reporter at the end of a campaign rally. A reporter was physically attacked by a congressional candidate in Montana. Several journalists were arrested as they reported on the protests in Washington on Inauguration Day. A journalist covering a Trump cabinet member during a visit to West Virginia was arrested for being too persistent in trying to get his questions answered. (That is called being a reporter, by the way.) A noose was left at the door of a small newspaper in California. Three journalists reported they were physically assaulted by demonstrators at a Make America Great Again rally in California in March 2017. Ten journalists faced criminal charges stemming from their coverage of the activists protesting a pipeline in South Dakota. Maybe there was no connection between the incidents and the hostile rhetoric spewing forth from the campaign and then from the White House, but you didn’t have to be paranoid to think that maybe the tone was being set from the top.
It’s not that journalists have a monopoly on truth. They don’t. Their methods implicitly acknowledge that the world is not thoroughly knowable. Statements are attributed to sources. Statements from the other side are presented. But journalists still proceed on the belief that truth does exist in the world and is worth pursuing. It gets proved to the best of our ability.
That was not the Trump way, as columnist Bret Stephens captured brilliantly in a speech he did honoring Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. Stephens reprised how Bill O’Reilly of Fox had questioned Trump after the election about his claim that three million aliens voted illegally. Wasn’t it irresponsible to say that without the data to back it up? O’Reilly wanted to know. Trump responded by saying that many people had come out and said he was right. “He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong,” Stephens noted. “He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: that they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion.”
That sentiment was less elegantly captured a few weeks later by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway with her enthusiastic defense of “alternative facts.” Chuck Todd of NBC had questioned her about the administration’s false claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. Conway was having none of it. “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving—Sean Spicer, our press secretary—gave alternative facts.”
“Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods,” Todd shot back. He later prodded her about how ridiculous the whole dispute had become and wanted to know why Trump and his aides had refused to give up on the fiction about how big the crowd was. How could it matter? “I’ll answer it this way,” Conway said. “Think about what you just said to your viewers. That’s why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.”
It was all of a piece, the prodding of America to see the mainstream media as fakers not worth listening to, voices to be ignored and discounted, without having to put up any evidence or show what was inaccurate. When Trump called reporters “disgusting human beings” or “awful people,” he summoned up the inevitable mindlessness of spite. It was easy to descend from there into presiding over a political rally in Arizona with the crowd chanting, “CNN sucks.” Trump’s announcement of the Fake News Awards in early 2018 was designed to humiliate. It was about drawing a line around those news organizations that were doing tough reporting on Trump and subjecting them to a little ridicule—and ridicule, whether on the playground or in the White House (there once was a difference), is always thought-free.
It was also politically brilliant. The administration’s accusation of false news rode on the back of the real fake news problem. It made a hash of the line that should have been obvious between a story fabricated by Russian agents intending to alienate and anger voters and the unintentional error of a legitimate news organization. It nudged people to think that no one other than the government and its allies could be trusted. It was the vacuum of unthinkingness. It was an inversion of the central tenet of American democracy I had grown up with in the hard-core conservative Midwest: distrust those in power.
For all of Trump’s belligerent calling out of The Times for fake news (point of pride: one of our columnists finished first in his Fake News Awards), the relationship between Trump and The Times remained perplexing. It was, like a long bitter marriage, complicated. Trump had shown up at The Times for an on-the-record interview shortly after Election Day. When his bungled attempt to repeal Obamacare failed, he immediately called Maggie Haberman, The Times’s reporter who was breaking scoop after scoop about what was really going on inside the walls of the White House. Mike Schmidt of The Times managed to get into the dining room at Mar-a-Lago during the holidays and do an exclusive with the president. Earlier, Trump had invited him and two colleagues to do an on-the-record sit-down interview at the White House. (Schmidt’s ability to gain the trust of people was legendary. He once showed me a picture from the White House session in which he was standing next to Trump and wearing a tie that extended to his thigh, just the way Trump’s tie did. I didn’t think the fashion decision was a coincidence.) And once upon a time, Trump, then just a real estate guy who liked to advertise his properties in the paper, did an advertisement endorsing The Times. “Our longstanding relationship with The New York Times will endure forever,” Trump said in the 2010 ad. The ad was unearthed during the campaign by Times historian David Dunlap, who wrote a story about it. I am sure that Trump was tempted to label it fake news, if only he could.
And for someone who was prone to condemning The Times as a purveyor of fake news, Trump showed an amazing willingness to find Times stories Grade A 100 percent certified prime Truth when it suited his purposes. In February 2018, The Times’s Matt Rosenberg reported out a story about how the CIA had been negotiating with Russian intelligence agents in hopes of purchasing the much-discussed-but-never-confirmed tape of Trump frolicking with Russian prostitutes. The CIA blasted the story as inaccurate. Not Trump. He tweeted:
According to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on “Trump” to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Earlier in his term, he had tweeted out a Times story about how small businesses were feeling more confident since the election. And when The Times published its blockbuster stories about Harvey Weinstein, Trump did not suggest his old friend was one more victim of fake news. “I’m not at all surprised to see it,” he said.
I was never convinced that there was any grand design to the seesawing way that Trump dealt with the paper, but if there were an explanation, it was most likely this: he craved The Times’s attention; he bridled at not being able to control The Times’s narrative.
And his attempt to control The Times was a bust. If he thought the broadsides about fake news would cow the paper into changing, he was sadly mistaken. By the time the Trump administration was settling in, The Times newsroom, after a period of post-election soul-searching, had a “business as usual” feel to it. People checked the box that this administration was not going to be like any other and then went about their work the way they always did. The thundering about fake news was just background noise, one or two ticks below a distraction. Jim Rutenberg, The Times media columnist, wrote about how, paradoxically, Trump’s unprecedented approach to the art of governing spurred The Times not to throw away the playbook but to revert to the fundamentals of by-the-book journalism: “There was palpable excitement over the chance to show traditional journalism’s true worth in the face of an administration that was clearly going to use misdirection, misinformation, and barbs against the press as governing tools. For as cynical a lot as there ever was, idealism rushed in,” Rutenberg wrote in the Wilson Quarterly. The hard-edged stories that were sent to me by editors for prepublication legal review—stories about the fall of General Flynn, the financial conflicts of Jared Kushner, the spider web of ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian oligarchy—were most noteworthy for how unnoteworthy they were in their approach to reporting the news: straightforward pieces built from credible sources, told in journalism’s usual dispassionate language. Maybe the best sign of all was that, as the first year of the administration rolled by, and the stories about Robert Mueller and Stormy Daniels and the Russian connections exploded across our pages, I was bypassed more and more often by the editors and reporters handling the Trump coverage. The stories went straight into the paper without a side trip through Legal. Trump’s legal fuming had once injected a certain caution into the newsroom about the possibility of libel suits. By the time 2017 turned into 2018, the message had gotten through: Nobody was going to be suing anyone over our accurate coverage of the administration.
Still, it wasn’t always possible to hear the “fake news” drumbeat and shrug. In the late summer of 2017, the PR person for a gun control group wrote to us with a strange cheeriness:
Morning all,
Just wanted to let you know that the NRA has released another unhinged video, this time targeting NYT. Apparently, they’re “coming for you.”
Happy Friday!
It was another release from NRA TV featuring its favorite over-the-top talking head, Dana Loesch, the go-to ringmistress for the group’s propaganda circus. Wearing a white knit top offset by the all-black background of the NRA studio, Loesch spews out her not-quite-controlled rage about fake news, directly addressing The New York Times: “Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow.… We’re going to laser-focus on your so-called honest pursuit of truth.… In short, we’re coming for you.”
Many people at The Times found it chilling and pressed us to respond in some way. All of that was understandable. We always had to worry about the one unbalanced (and, in this case, likely armed) person who would take the provocation to heart—nobody could pretend that we lived in some other world—and all the gun imagery was menacing and intentionally so. But I questioned whether we really wanted to give the NRA and its minions the satisfaction of knowing they had our attention. Menacing messages could at some point go too far and become illegal threats, but the First Amendment gave a lot of protection to even nasty speakers, and the NRA seemed to know how to slither right up to the line but not cross it. I recommended that we ignore the video. It had been around for months and gone largely unnoticed, which NRA TV was probably used to. Driving more traffic to NRA TV helped no one but the NRA and made us less safe, not more. As was inevitable, some of our reporters tweeted about the video and engaged in a minor internet skirmish with Loesch and her NRA enablers, but we stood down as a company. We were willing to let the hit piece fade into obscurity.
I was more than a little surprised, then, to pick up the Sunday Times a few months later and find spread across the Style section a glowing profile of … Dana Loesch. The piece crowned her “The National Rifle Association’s Telegenic Warrior.” For good measure the story also labeled her “wonder woman,” and she and The Times reporter took a fun field trip to the neighborhood shooting range, the Crossfire Defense Academy & Range. The “We’re Coming for You” video was neatly disposed of in a sentence that described it as “an ad in 2017 aimed at The New York Times.” Dana came across as a lovely person.
I think, upon reflection, it spoke well of The Times. Loesch was a person in the news, and we write about people in the news, not just the people we agree with. I never heard whether Loesch considered the piece about her fake news, but a couple of weeks later she was once again lighting up the screen at NRA TV—literally. A new NRA video showed Loesch holding up a lighter to a print edition of The New York Times. “You know, I don’t even have to do this. You guys are doing a good enough job burning down your reputations all by yourselves,” Loesch says in the piece.
Lovely.
But that is how the First Amendment works—part of our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open,” as Justice William Brennan said in Times v. Sullivan. Speakers are allowed to be provocative, colorful, contradictory, and wrong. It is a beautiful thing. Bizarre some days, but still beautiful.
Somewhere in the midst of the fight for America’s hearts and minds, in the national conversation about the place of press freedom in a democracy, I feared the discussion was running off course. The debate was getting framed as liberal versus conservative—as if the left believed in freedom of speech and the right was against it. I thought it was a huge mistake for those of us who cared about freedom of speech to buy into that analysis. In 2010, just seven years earlier, Congress had passed its most significant law related to libel. It was called the SPEECH Act, and it was designed to protect U.S. publishers. It was addressed to a problem that had cropped up in recent years. U.S. publishers were being sued by Russian oligarchs, Saudis who were implicated in the funding of terrorism, and international businessmen suspected of corruption. Only they weren’t bringing those cases in American courtrooms. They were suing in other countries that had laws that didn’t adequately protect the press and made it easier for plaintiffs to win. Congress decided to draw the line by passing the SPEECH Act, which barred U.S. courts from enforcing judgments won by libel plaintiffs abroad if those plaintiffs would have lost the same case brought in the United States. And that was almost always going to be the case. So plaintiffs who had won elsewhere could not come to this country and get the courts to force U.S. publishers to pay the damages they had been awarded. The law freed U.S. publishers to continue to do tough reporting on global issues, like terrorism and international crime. When the bill came up for a vote in the House, it passed unanimously. The result in the Senate was the same; everyone voted in favor of it.
I kept thinking that in our divided times we needed to find our way back to that place. Whatever our disagreements, whatever our politics, we should be able to agree on the importance of a free press. Belief in a free press was not a liberal value—it was an American value. Couldn’t we find common ground on just that one thing?
If the president’s tweets were any indication, the answer appeared to be no.