Paul Levinson
The destruction on the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) at the hands of the Nazis is a well-known and tragically significant story. Beset by a de facto alliance of Nazis, Communists, and monarchists—unlikely bedfellows whose only commonality was a loathing of democracy—the republic (the official name of which was Deutsches Reich, or German Realm) didn’t stand a chance.
The television series Babylon Berlin (2017–2018) presents a dramatically accurate snapshot of this state of affairs in 1929. The bedrocks of democracy, including freedom of speech, were present, if not well established, in the Weimar Republic. Article 118 of its constitution provided that “no censorship will take place,” though motion pictures were exempted from this protection (mirroring Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 1915, in which the United States Supreme Court held that motion pictures were not protected by the First Amendment—a decision not overturned by the Supreme Court until Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952). The Nazis attained a plurality (33 percent) in the Reichstag in 1932, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor a year later, and in 1934 Hitler declared himself führer and assumed absolute power. Fundamental to the Nazi ascension of power and subsequent governing was an all-out attack on all media, especially conveyors of news. The attack began in the 1920s with shouts of Lügenpresse—“lying press”—at Nazi rallies.1 Undermining the public’s confidence in a foundation of democracy proved to be an effective first step in removing it completely.
Hitler’s hatred of the press was also expressed in his preference for radio, which allowed him to address the German people without journalistic intermediaries, who, he was sure, deliberately distorted his message.2 In the United States beginning in 2016, Donald Trump has apparently found the same freedom from journalistic interpretation in Twitter, and has used it the same way as Hitler used radio.3
And since January 2017, Trump has also denounced the press as “fake,” every chance he gets. We have no monarchists here in the United States. Communist and radical-left adherents are relatively small in number. Nazis and white supremacists are more numerous, but neither are likely, even combined, to topple our republic. But Trump’s attack on the press as fake news, from his powerful position as president, may be one of the greatest threats to democracy our nation has ever encountered, and needs to be taken seriously.
Before looking at how Trump has adopted the fake news moniker as a weapon to undermine reporting of real news, we need to understand what fake news really is.
To begin with, it’s not just news reports that are factually incorrect or in error. That happens all the time, in all news media, and is why the New York Times has a “corrections” column (which used to be called “errata”). The New York Times publishes errors all the time—usually here and there in one or more articles, sometimes systematically, as in Jayson Blair’s years of concocted articles replete with made-up interviews, revealed in 2003. But does this mean, then, as Trump has often bellowed, that the New York Times is “fake news”? (For example, “The failing @nytimes does major FAKE NEWS China story saying ‘Mr. Xi has not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov.14.’ We spoke at length yesterday!”).4 Not unless we believed that the newspaper deliberately published Blair’s fabrications, and every other news story with errors, knowing full well they were errors.
But some people apparently do believe this. A recent survey reports that 17 percent of Americans “strongly agree” that the “New York Times regularly reports made up or fake news about Trump and his administration,” in contrast to 17 percent who “strongly disagree,” 27 percent with “no opinion,” and the rest in the middle.5 Bill O’Reilly, in a recent interview with me, explained that the New York Times “couldn’t care less about seeking the truth. They take their orders from their corporate masters”6—in other words, nothing, according to O’Reilly, is worthy of belief in the New York Times, and the errors are deliberate, that is, distortions dictated by “corporate masters.”
The notion that nothing is reliable in the news media is as extreme—and, to some people, as self-evident and even comforting as a guide to political life—as the other end of the continuum, the naive view that everything we read in a newspaper or see on a TV news show is true. Yet how do we combat these views with a recognition that some of the news we receive is incorrect, but most of it is not deliberately deceitful, which is the hallmark of fake news?
I’ve often said that the famous tagline of the New York Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—is a deliberate distortion. No news medium, including the New York Times, ever publishes all of the news, or has any way of intrinsically identifying what news is “fit to print” and what news is not. Instead, the news editors make decisions about what to print, where to place the story in the newspaper (front page or wherever), how long the article should be, and other considerations. A more truthful logo for the New York Times would therefore be “All the news that we deem fit to print.” Similarly, the iconic newscaster Walter Cronkite ended his nightly news reports on CBS-TV with a gravitic “And that’s the way it is,” but he would have been truthful had he concluded with something along the lines of “And that’s the way a small group of editors here at CBS thought you should think it was.” But acknowledging such distortions does not mean that nothing reported in the New York Times or on the CBS Evening News is true. How, then, can we ascertain whether a given story is true or not?
I first thought about this problem a long time ago, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and I was sixteen years old. How did I know that JFK had really been killed? The answer seemed obvious and clear back then, and still does today: consult other media. If every newspaper and radio newscast and TV newscast is reporting the same thing, then that makes it likely that the reports are true. To believe otherwise would be to posit that all media were in some sort of conspiracy to deceive us. Back in 1963, I reasoned that maybe that was so in the Soviet Union, but not here in the United States, or in any free, democratic society.
Note, however, that the number of media that report the same thing need to be more than just a handful—they should be myriad and legion as evidence of truth. When I received the final page proofs for my novel The Plot to Save Socrates, the proofreader had a query for me: was I sure that Charles Darwin had actually visited the home of William Henry Appleton in New York (as I had mentioned offhand in the novel). Yes, I said to myself, I was sure. I knew I had seen that online. I then confirmed it on at least half a dozen sites. But something about the query bothered me. So I looked in one of the books I had about Darwin in my home library, and, lo and behold, it said there in plain English on page 94 that Darwin had never been to the United States.7 I checked several other biographies of Darwin on my bookshelf, and they concurred. The proofreader had been right!
But why, then, did so many online sites say otherwise? I discovered that the error had originated with the Wave Hill website (Wave Hill, now a public garden, had been Appleton’s home), and the other sites had simply copied the wording from the Wave Hill site, without verifying the information. There was nothing controversial about Darwin visiting America, so none of these other sites thought they had any reason to check the Wave Hill site’s facts.
Today, we have vastly more sites where facts can be checked on the internet, and they’re much more easily reached.
The plethora of online news and information sites, reachable twenty-four hours a day, from almost anywhere in the world, via any laptop or smartphone, provides access not only to accurate news reporting but also to incorrect reporting due to accident, corporate bias, or just plain deliberate falsehood born of politics or a malicious desire to mislead, also known as fake news. But it would be an error to say that the myriad of sources is both a blessing and a curse, and leave it that, because the ability to check any news story, in as many places as you like, is the ultimate antidote to fake news, whether it appears in newspapers, on cable news shows, or somewhere online.
But this in turn means that we must take special precautions to make sure that these sources of legitimate news are not undermined, whether by Trump’s and O’Reilly’s denunciations or, much more insidiously, by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) attempts of government to address the problem of fake news by regulation of social media.
As I’ve written in many places, we are fortunate in the United States to have a First Amendment that flatly prohibits any government regulation of speech and press.8 Unfortunately, this prohibition has all too often been ignored (as in the 1978 United States Supreme Court case Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, in which government threatening of WBAI-FM Radio was upheld). But its value has never been more paramount than in this, our age of fake news. Even O’Reilly and Trump don’t allege that all media are engaged in a conspiracy to report false information. But were our government to any way control news reporting in social media, the source of so much of our news today, the government in that one fell swoop would be enacting a conspiracy to shape the information we receive.
In the end, the best defense we have against the United States succumbing to what happened to the Weimar Republic is not that we have no monarchists in the United States or even that we in America are somehow more rational than the denizens of the Weimar Republic (because we are not—evolution does not move that quickly). The best defense is keeping all of our channels of information wide open, not only to the dissemination of fake news, but to the dissemination of truthful reporting, which, as John Milton argued in his Areopagitica nearly four hundred years ago, is the most reliable way of defeating falsity in the marketplace of ideas.9
Note that, in this schema, a prevalence of falsity in the marketplace is not an insurmountable problem. As long as truth exists somewhere, in a place where people can find it, that one true statement will be recognized as such by our rationality. This persistence of rationality in the face of fake news was experimentally demonstrated by John G. Bullock, Alan S. Gerber, Seth J. Hill, and Gregory A. Huber, who found that subjects identified truthful news reports as such even when these reports contradicted the subjects’ political biases, if a small financial incentive was provided for identifying the truth.10 This suggests that belief in fake news is a lazy luxury that can be easily cracked.
To return to Milton’s point, the ultimate threat would then be not too much fake news and falsity, but too little truth available to refute it. We all, therefore, must make our best efforts to ensure that truthful news reports, also known as honest journalism, are never limited or extinguished, by intention or well-meaning accident.
1. See Victoria Saker Woeste, “The Anti-Semitic Origins of the War on ‘Fake News,’” Washington Post, September 5, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/05/the-anti-semitic-origins-of-the-war-on-fake-news/.
2. See Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1997).
3. See Paul Levinson, McLuhan in the Age of Social Media (White Plains, NY: Connected Editions, 2018).
4. Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “The failing @nytimes does major FAKE NEWS,” Twitter, February, 10, 2017, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/830047626414477312.
5. “How much do you agree that The New York Times regularly reports made up or fake news about Donald Trump and his administration?,” Statista, November 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/784088/nyt-fake-news-trump/.
6. Paul Levinson, interview by Bill O’Reilly, No Spin News, May 29, 2018, https://youtu.be/Ry6bnZyRaIM.
7. Hans Schwarz, Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).
8. See Paul Levinson “Government Regulation of Social Media Would Be a ‘Cure’ Far Worse than the Disease,” The Conversation, November 28, 2017, https://theconversation.com/government-regulation-of-social-media-would-be-a-cure-far-worse-than-the-disease-86911; Paul Levinson, “The First Amendment in the Post-Truth Age,” The Digital Life (blog), Garrison Institute, May 15, 2018, https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/the-first-amendment-in-the-post-truth-age/.
9. John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644), https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/areopagitica-by-john-milton-1644.
10. John G. Bullock, Alan S. Gerber, Seth J. Hill, and Gregory A. Huber, “Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10, no. 4 (2015): 519–578. See Paul Levinson, Fake News in Real Context (White Plains, NY: Connected Editions, 2018).