Chapter 4

The Decline of Mainstream Media’s Influence

“How the heck can voters think Donald Trump is more honest than Hillary Clinton?” was the headline of a November 2, 2016 article in the Washington Post’s “The Fix,” one of the most prominent political columns in the US, written by Chris Cillizza. In the column, Cillizza goes over a number of lies told by Trump, such as his false claim of opposing the war in Iraq from the start, or the lies about seeing thousands of Muslims cheering on rooftops in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. He then describes how the well-regarded fact-checking column of the Washington Post gave Trump a rating of Four Pinocchios or “totally false” on 63 percent of the 91 Trump statements checked by the column. By comparison, most candidates get between 10 and 20 percent of their checked statements rated as Four Pinocchios, and Clinton fell right in the middle, with 14.2 percent. Cillizza goes on to express confusion and concern that the Washington Post–ABC News tracking poll that came out just before the article, surveying likely voters on October 30‒31, showed that respondents saw Trump as more trustworthy and honest than Clinton by an eight-point margin (see Figure 4.1).

The problem, according to Cillizza, stems from people’s mistaken perceptions of Trump as more honest than Clinton due to the candidates’ communication styles. Cillizza at the same time defends the reporting of mainstream newspapers, TV networks, and radio. Cillizza wrote that while it’s easy to scapegoat mainstream media for failing to fact-check and call out Trump’s lies, the media actually do so quite frequently. To quote Cillizza, “The problem here isn’t the media. The problem is that people stick very hard to their own preconceived notions—evidence to the contrary be damned.” He goes on to nuance this statement by slamming new media sources: “One place where the media can be blamed is in the rise of partisan media outlets that offer confirmation bias galore to people who see the world through a particular partisan lens.”

Fig. 4.1 Poll results from Washington Post–ABC News tracking poll on October 30‒31, 2016 (image courtesy of the Washington Post’s “The Fix,” November 2, 2016)

Fig. 4.1 Poll results from Washington Post–ABC News tracking poll on October 30‒31, 2016 (image courtesy of the Washington Post’s “The Fix,” November 2, 2016)

Cillizza’s response to Trump is typical of most mainstream media commentary on the matter of Trump’s and Clinton’s honesty, and other qualities needed for a presidential candidate. No wonder that Trump received fewer endorsements by major newspapers than any major party candidate in American history. Just 2 regional newspapers—the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times-Union—endorsed Trump, compared to Clinton’s 57, according to the American Presidency Project. Moreover, Clinton received endorsements from newspapers that generally endorse Republican candidates, such as the Dallas Morning News, the Arizona Republic, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Houston Chronicle, and the Columbus Dispatch. Other newspapers, such as USA Today, asked their readers to vote for anyone but Trump. In fact, the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, received twice as many endorsements from major newspapers as did Trump.

In these endorsements, Trump’s prolific lies served as one of the biggest issues determining the anti-Trump bent of the newspaper editorial boards. Yet such articles still had not changed people’s perceptions of Trump being more honest than Clinton on the eve of the election, as the Washington Post–ABC News tracking poll (Fig. 4.1) showed. Neither did all of the newspaper endorsements stop Trump from being elected president, though they might have made a dent in Trump’s support.

What explains this apparent inability of the mainstream media to make a sufficient impact on the electorate’s beliefs and actions? What is the tie-in to the broader context of transformations in mainstream media and our society as a whole? And is Trump really all that different in the extent and nature of his lies than Clinton or other politicians?

Is Trump Really Different from Other Politicians?

We’ll start with the last question first. Certainly, plenty of presidents have lied in the past. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” according to Bill Clinton’s statement in January 1998. Sure you didn’t, Clinton—tell us another one. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” No we can’t, Barack Obama. That statement was rated as “Lie of the Year” by PolitiFact for 2013. To look back a little farther in history, Lyndon Johnson interrupted TV broadcasts on August 4, 1964, to make the false claim that two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin had come under unprovoked attack in international waters by North Vietnam. This lie paved the path for the Vietnam war, according to Edwin Moïse’s 1996 Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.

Republican presidents lied, too. “The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” according to George W. Bush on March 18, 2003, the day before he took military action in Iraq. However, a study by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism, found that, “The Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated.” The study identified 935 separate false statements by the administration, according to Charles Lewis’s 2014 book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity. Remember too: Ronald Reagan lied about the Iran‒Contra affair. On November 13, 1986 he said he did not trade arms for hostages (he did). Richard Nixon is perhaps the most glaring example of a president who lied, in his case to cover up the criminal efforts of his political staff to wiretap political opponents in the infamous Watergate scandal. “I am not a crook,” said Nixon (he was).

Nonetheless, when called out by the media, experts, and investigations, these political figures have generally backtracked on their deceptions. On November 7, 2013, Obama apologized for his deceptive statements about people being able to keep their plan. In August 1998, Bill Clinton stated: “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife.” On March 4, 1987, Reagan apologized that “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.” Bush stated in a December 1, 2008 interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC News that the “biggest regret of all the presidency” was incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Nixon had to resign under threat of impeachment when his cover-up was publicized.

Moreover, these leaders kept their lies within certain proportions. As mentioned above, most politicians get Four Pinocchios from the Washington Post Fact Checker column between 10 and 20 percent of the time. Trump got Four Pinocchios 63 percent of the time, over four times as much as the average politician (see Figure 4.2).

Fig. 4.2 The Washington Post Fact Checker comparison of Clinton and Trump on November 3, 2016 (courtesy of the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/fact-checker/)

Fig. 4.2 The Washington Post Fact Checker comparison of Clinton and Trump on November 3, 2016 (courtesy of the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/fact-checker/)

Other fact-checkers report similar figures. For example, Politifact. org’s Truth-O-Meter comparison from November 3, 2016 rated Clinton as having made 72 fully “True” statements compared to Trump’s 16; 29 “False” statements compared to Trump’s 127; and 7 blatantly deceptive or “Pants on Fire” statements, compared to Trump’s 64. The overall percentage of “True” statements for Clinton is 24.5 percent and “Pants on Fire” is 2.3 percent, and for Trump the figures are 4.1 percent “True” and 16.5 percent “Pants on Fire.” The number of “Pants on Fire” for Trump is particularly telling, as is the number of Four Pinocchios for Trump compared to Clinton. Trump not only lies more often, but his lies are generally further from the truth than those of other politicians. Before suspecting partisan bias, let’s remember that the Washington Post Fact Checker column revealed Clinton’s lie about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, and PolitiFact labeled Obama’s promise that people can keep their plan the biggest lie of the year in 2013.

Trump’s lies are not simply a matter of much bigger quantity: they are on a whole different level of quality. By contrast to other prominent politicians, when Trump is called out on his deceptive statements by the media, he attacks the credibility of reporters instead of backing down like previous presidents. For instance, on June 13, 2016, he revoked the press credentials of the well-known and highly reputable Washington Post, calling the newspaper “phony and dishonest.” Trump’s statement on revoking the credentials read: “I am no fan of President Obama, but to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is, they wrote, ‘Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting’ as their headline. Sad!” Trump referred to the June 12, 2016 shooting in Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub, an act that combined elements of a terrorist attack and a hate crime, as the shooter’s motivations mixed anti-LGBTQ sentiments with Muslim beliefs.

Yet did the Washington Post truly get it wrong? Let’s examine Trump’s response on Fox News after the shooting: “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can’t believe it.” To any reasonable external observer, the “something else in mind” that people “can’t believe” is a pretty clear suggestion of then-President Obama’s involvement with the shooting, despite any evidence. Such messages appeal well to the conservative-leaning audience of Fox News. Yet when the Washington Post called out Trump for his deceptive suggestion, he labeled the newspaper dishonest and revoked its credentials.

Speaking at an August 9, 2016 rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump made a statement about what would happen if Clinton were elected president and chose a Supreme Court nominee whose interpretation of the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” allowed for tighter gun regulations: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.” In response, mainstream media called out Trump for his hinting that gun-rights supporters could shoot Clinton if she got elected to prevent her from appointing judges who would tighten gun laws. For instance, Esquire ran a piece by Charles Pierce with the headline “The Moment You Realize Trump Finally Crossed the Line,” asking whether Trump’s suggestion for Clinton to be shot was the moment when Trump crossed the line that would make him unelectable.

Certainly, Pierce was wrong in Trump being unelectable after that statement, but Pierce’s analysis of Trump’s statement as suggestive of assassination reflects what any reasonable, objective observer would say. Many other mainstream media outlets had similar interpretations. Yet the Trump campaign sent an email in response to this situation entitled “Trump Campaign Statement on Dishonest Media,” which explained Trump’s statement as follows: “It’s called the power of unification—2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power. And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.” Of course, Trump’s campaign response did not explain how Second Amendment people voting in record numbers would stop Clinton from picking Supreme Court judges who would tighten gun-control laws if she did get elected—the controversial part of Trump’s statement at the rally. Since voting would not stop her from doing so if she was already elected, and since the Second Amendment is about gun rights, the hint of assassination is obvious to any unbiased observer. Trump is lying when he attacks the media for being dishonest in highlighting this hint.

Another example: When asked by the moderator in his third presidential debate with Clinton whether he would accept the 2016 presidential election results—a question responding to Trump’s claims of mainstream voter fraud and election rigging—Trump responded: the “media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile-on is so amazing.” He went on to say that the election system is rigged as a whole, and singled out the New York Times in particular for its reporting on the matter. Trump’s statements proved so problematic that the Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan decided he had to step in, and on October 15, 2016 he commented that “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

After the election, many hoped Trump would abandon his strategy of accusing the media of dishonesty when they called him out on his lies. Not so. As an example, after winning the Electoral College vote and losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million, Trump claimed in a November 17, 2016 tweet: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He was referring to non-mainstream, conservative news sources with a reputation for frequent false statement, which claimed millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the election. However, neither he nor the non-mainstream conservative news offered any evidence. Trump received a great deal of criticism for making such damaging and controversial claims without proof. Evaluating this claim, prominent fact-checkers found that it had no substance: Snopes. com published an article stating that “Zero evidence has been put forth to support the widely parroted claim that 3 million ‘illegal aliens’ voted in the 2016 presidential election.” David Becker, the Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, stated that “You’re more likely to get eaten by a shark that simultaneously gets hit by lightning than to find a noncitizen voting.”

Again, Trump doubled down. He used his presidential powers to convene a task force led by Vice President Mike Pence to investigate this supposed voter fraud, announced on February 5, 2017. Factcheck.org published in response a piece entitled “More Trump Deception on Voter Fraud.” Some prominent Republicans came forward again to contradict Trump, for instance Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “There’s no evidence that [voter fraud] occurred in such a significant number that would have changed the presidential election, and I don’t think we ought to spend any federal money investigating that.” Indeed, President Trump’s own legal team filed a complaint in Pennsylvania stating, “There is no evidence—or even an allegation—that any tampering with Pennsylvania’s voting systems occurred.” Still, Trump kept bashing any media figures or experts who went against his false claims of voter fraud.

In summary, yes, Trump has taken political deception to a whole new level. Analysis of his speeches tends to indicate that he lies 3‒6 times more than other politicians, and that these lies are more intense (as seen from the ratings of Four Pinocchios and “Pants on Fire”). Additionally, when caught in a lie by mainstream media with evidence of deception that would be convincing to any reasonable objective observer, Trump doubles down and attacks the media as dishonest and crooked. This combination of quantity and quality makes Trump substantively more deceitful than any modern US president, deserving of the label, “post-truth politician.”

Trump’s Anti-Media Outbursts: Tactics or Strategy?

Based on the preceding section, we might suppose that Trump is simply using the tactic of slamming the mainstream media to avoid acknowledging his lies. However, evidence suggests that this tactic is part of a broader strategy to undermine the role of the mainstream media in our political system. For example, we can see that Trump does not limit his tactic of disparaging the media to specific instances of vital political significance. When Ben Terris, a well-known reporter for the Washington Post, wrote a story about Trump cheating at golf (September 4, 2015), Trump attacked him as a “totally dishonest reporter, a real creep.” Trump provided no refutation of the solid facts offered by Terris, who spoke with many credible people who played golf with Trump, such as Mark Mulvoy, former managing editor of Sports Illustrated. According to Mulvoy, after a quick break in a golf game with Trump due to rain, they both came out to the green, and a ball appeared 10 feet away from the hole, which Trump claimed was his. Mulvoy stated, “Donald, give me a f—ing break...You’ve been hacking away in the . . . weeds all day. You do not lie there.” Trump responded, “Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time...I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”

This is far from the only time that Trump responded in such an aggressive and extreme manner to a well-sourced, solidly investigated story that had minor political significance. Indeed, a leading conservative magazine, National Review, published a story on August 17, 2016 with the headline “Trump Has Cried Wolf Too Often on Media Bias.” The right-leaning author notes that most media figures tend to lean left, and there are some legitimate causes for concern over reporting. Still, he criticizes Trump for going way over the top in claiming media bias, writing that whenever the media called Trump out for “making an offensive remark, he’d dishonestly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context and that they were just out to get him.” The author notes Trump’s problematic claims “to have never said something that he was captured on video saying” or insisting “he was taken out of context when the context was clear and reported accurately” or denying “cold, hard facts presented to him by interviewers.” As a result of this “overplaying of the media-bias card,” it was likely that in the future, “legitimate examples of media malpractice” would be ignored.

Worse still, Trump has attacked the media as a whole without any specific news stories to provoke his ire. For instance, in a February 17, 2017 tweet, Trump stated that NBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and the New York Times—all highly credible news sources—are “the enemy of the American People.” He repeated this attack in a speech on February 24, 2017 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), stating that much of the press “are the enemy of the people because they have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.” As someone who emigrated from the Republic of Moldova, which used to be part of the former Soviet Union before its independence in 1991, this phrase had strong echoes for me. The phrase “enemy of the people” has been a staple of authoritarian dictators for decades, most notably Joseph Stalin, as described in Benedikt Sarnov’s 2002 book. The phrase went out of use under Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced it in a 1956 speech to the Soviet Communist Party, where he stated that the “formula ‘enemy of the people’ was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” (as described in Edward Crankshaw’s 2011 Khrushchev). While we do not know whether Trump knew the history of this “formula” when he first used it, it’s hard to imagine his staff did not alert him to the multitude of news stories that soon emerged about the phrase. The fact that he has used it repeatedly since then raises grave concerns over his intentions toward the media.

The day after the CPAC speech, Trump chose to take the unprecedented step of barring several specific news organizations from an off-camera White House briefing, including CNN, the New York Times, Politico, BuzzFeed News, The Guardian, the BBC, and others. The Associated Press and Time chose to boycott the briefing despite being invited, due to the exclusion. Commenting on this matter, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said: “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties.”

Trump may go even further. About a year before the CPAC speech, on February 26, 2016, at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump indicated that when elected he would “open up our libel laws so when...the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money.” How could Trump orchestrate a change in libel laws? In February 2019, conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to echo Trump’s sentiment, publicly urging the Court to reconsider a landmark 1964 ruling that made it harder for public figures to sue the media for defamation (“Justice Thomas assails landmark U.S. libel ruling that protects media,” Reuters, February 19, 2019).

Trump and Game Theory: “Working the Refs”

Why does Trump pursue a systematic, strategic approach of destroying the legitimacy of the media in our political system? From the perspective of game theory—the study of conflict and cooperation between rational agents in any given system—politics can be considered a large, multipolar game with many different agents, a perspective explored in James Morrow’s 1994 book on this topic. From this game-theory perspective, although the mainstream media have certain biases, overall, they serve the function of the referees. After all, the media themselves cannot “win” the political power game. This game-theory view aligns with the Enlightenment-era conception of the press as the Fourth Estate of our public sphere, serving as a powerful force for mediating between the different political actors in this system.

How does this look in practice? Imagine Democrat Denisha facing off against Republican Rhonda in a race for mayor. Denisha accuses Rhonda of unethical hiring practices at her insurance firm, while Rhonda accuses Denisha—the current mayor—of taking bribes from a contractor in return for hiring him to renovate the town hall. Naturally, both deny the accusations leveled against them. Who is lying—Denisha, Rhonda, or both? I don’t know, and neither do you. While I would like to know, as this would help determine my choice of who to vote for, I will not take the time to go to Rhonda’s insurance firm and evaluate the hiring practices. Neither will I take the time to look at all the factors involved in the hiring decision for the town hall renovation. You and I have better ways of spending our time.

Instead, we as a society outsource that role to the media. It is the job of investigative reporters to find out who is telling the truth by examining the claims of each politician, and reporting them to us in the form of a newspaper, TV or radio broadcast, or online article. We pay their salaries to get us this information when we buy print newspapers, subscribe to digital newspapers and cable news programs, or in the case of nonprofits, donate to support their work. We also pay for their reporting by paying attention to advertisements, the vehicle that corporations and other entities use to deliver their messages to us. In exchange for these payments, we get an evaluation by a professional journalist of whether Denisha or Rhonda lied, and the circumstances surrounding the deception.

If there were no media, we would not be able to tell who lied. The game would not have referees. Instead, it would be a free-for-all, since we would not know who is telling the truth. From that game-theory perspective, it would not be rational to orient toward the truth if one’s goal is to win power through attracting voters. Instead, it would be most effective to make statements that are most likely to appeal to voters and get votes. Truth-telling, as described in Colin Camerer’s 2003 book, is an optimal game-theory strategy only when there are specific constraints that provide incentives for truth-telling, or punishments for lying. The media provides these incentives and punishments to tell the truth and avoid lies.

In other words: without a strong media, the best liars win.

Trump’s attacks on the media echo those of Richard Nixon. As described in a 2016 article by Christopher Cimaglio and a 2010 book by Mark Feldstein, Nixon had Vice President Spiro Agnew lead a deliberate anti-media campaign. Agnew gave a harshly worded speech criticizing the supposed elite journalists who held a “concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history.” Nixon also attacked individual news sources. He told his staff to give the Washington Post “damnable, damnable problems” getting its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licenses renewed and to damage the newspaper’s real estate investments. Nixon tried to make it a felony for reporters to get leaked information and ordered illegal wiretaps of reporters he perceived as unfriendly to him. Nixon clearly knew what he was up to: he termed these strategies “working the refs,” as in the referees of the political game. Nixon’s deliberate strategies to undermine the media as referees and position himself as the victim of media bias helped fuel the subsequent conservative criticism of the media as inherently liberal and biased against conservatives.

Trump took his anti-media campaign to a whole new level. Like Nixon, he portrays himself as a victim of media bias. Unlike Nixon, Trump challenges the media on simple facts that are clearly true to any reasonable observer, and denies his own statements even when they are caught on video. Trump often does not offer evidence to support his statements, instead relying on his own personal authority and setting himself up as the sole voice of the truth for his supporters. He is pursuing a game-theory strategy aligned with that of a player who is trying to destroy the referees so that he can use lies and deception to win power.

Unfortunately, Trump’s tactics proved all too effective in the 2016 US presidential election. Gallup conducts an annual survey about how much Americans trust the mainstream media. The survey asks one question: “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mainstream media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly—a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?” Gallup breaks down the results by party lines, enabling us to evaluate trends in public trust in the media. The poll conducted in early September 2016, and published on Gallup’s site with the headline “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low,” describes how overall trust in the media has dropped to 32 percent, from 40 percent in September 2015. More than that, trust among Republicans has fallen by more than half, from 32 percent in September 2015 to 14 percent in September 2016. Gallup’s own analysts suggest that this steep decline resulted from “Trump’s sharp criticisms of the press,” as well as similar criticism by other Republican leaders in the presidential election campaign.

Fig. 4.3 Gallup poll chart of trust in mainstream media broken down by party lines (courtesy of Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mainstream-media-sinks-new-low.aspx)

Fig. 4.3 Gallup poll chart of trust in mainstream media broken down by party lines (courtesy of Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mainstream-media-sinks-new-low.aspx)

Some may wonder whether other factors besides Trump’s broadsides against journalists may be at play in declining Republican trust in the mainstream media. To address this question, we can compare the trust among Republicans in mainstream media for previous years (see Figure 4.3).

As the chart shows, in September 2013, Republicans expressed trust in the mainstream media at 33 percent, which went down slightly to 27 percent in September 2014 and up again to 32 percent in September 2015. This level has held fairly steady for over a decade, with minor fluctuations. Recent presidential election cycles—such as the highly competitive 2008 one or the less competitive 2012 one—have not resulted in major disturbances in Republican trust in the media. The most likely explanation for the sharp decline of trust in the mainstream media by Republicans from 2015 to 2016 is the effect of Trump’s rhetoric.

Right-leaning media have reinforced Trump’s anti-media message. According to the Investor’s Daily Business, “The profound leftward ideological bias of the Big Media is the main reason why America now seems saturated with ‘fake news.’ Journalists, besotted with their own ideology, are no longer able to recognize their own bias” (“Media Bias: Pretty Much All of Journalism Now Leans Left, Study Shows,” November 16, 2018).

Fox News ran a segment entitled “Rushing to Judgement,” on February 21, 2019, in which host Sean Hannity declared: “According to the mainstream media, all Trump supporters are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—we’re all monsters.” The segment was about stories the mainstream media had gotten wrong, specifically one about an alleged homophobic, racist hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett. When the story first broke, the media gushed outraged commentary—until police determined it was all a hoax staged by Smollett, and charged him with filing a false report (the charges were later dropped). Hannity, however, used deceptive hyperbole, exaggerating from a few isolated but valid incidents of the media rushing to judgment in order to discredit all mainstream reporting: “Time after time this mob get it wrong. The media and their friends on the left are always happy to besmirch, smear and slander anyone, as long as it fits into their divisive political narrative. Now, this has been the case for decades, but it has never been this bad.” In a subsequent commentary he added, “Journalism in this country is dead.” The implication of his remark is that mainstream media are so politically motivated that Fox viewers can no longer trust them as a source of objective news.

“Working the Refs” Around the Globe

Trump’s actions bear a number of similarities to those pursued by another post-truth political leader, Vladimir Putin, in his early years in office (see Jonathan Becker’s 2004 peer-reviewed article, “Lessons from Russia: a neo-authoritarian media system”). After achieving power first as Prime Minister in 1999 and then President in 2000, Putin quickly moved to attack the media. An article published in 2000 in the opposition newspaper Kommersant prior to Putin’s election, entitled “The Reform of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation,” included apparent leaks of Putin’s media plans. He wanted to impose central government control over the mass media with the goal of suppressing criticism of the government and painting Putin and his administration in a favorable light, while denigrating the opposition.

Putin’s methods included not simply spin and lying, but also imposing financial pressure on the media for criticizing the government, a sentiment echoed by Trump’s suggestion of libel laws. Putin’s administration acted on these plans quickly, with the government in 2000‒2001 taking control over the three federal TV channels through buyouts, while closing others through imposing fines. Similar actions occurred for major newspapers. Moreover, the plans called for surveillance of journalists perceived as critical of Putin. The government implemented these plans with increasing harassment, violence, and murder of reporters. In March 2019, the Russian parliament passed a new law allowing courts to jail people for online “disrespect” of government or state officials, including Putin. No wonder freedom of the press in Russia, as rated by Freedom House, steadily grew worse. It went from a score of 60 (0 best, 100 worst) in 2002, the first year for which a rating is available, to 66 in 2003, 67 in 2004, 72 in 2006, and 83 in 2016. By comparison, the United States is at 21, while Afghanistan is at 62, Libya is at 76, and Iraq is at 71—all better than Russia.

We see similar developments at an earlier stage in Turkey, under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Freedom House scores for media freedom in Turkey fell rapidly as Erdogan consolidated power in this formerly democratic country, from 54 in 2010, to 62 in 2013, to 71 in 2016. Erdogan’s administration uses anti-terrorism laws to arrest journalists and censor and close down media outlets. Turkey had more journalists imprisoned than in any other country in the world in 2012 according to Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The government pressured media outlets to fire journalists who covered anti-government protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul in May 2013. The year after that, Erdogan combined continued harsh criticism of journalists, in the style of Trump, with passing new laws that enabled the government to block more websites and also surveil journalists. In 2015, the government took over the prominent media company Koza Ipek Holding, and imposed more bureaucratic burdens for journalistic accreditation to place journalists under further state authority. These transformations paved the way for Erdogan to seize more political power, transforming the country from a democratic nation to one characterized by growing authoritarianism. On April 16, 2017, Erdogan’s administration pushed through a referendum by popular vote to transform the country’s parliamentary system into one with an extremely powerful executive presidency. Many experts on Turkey call it the ending of Turkish democracy. The referendum has been widely marred by reports of vote rigging, physical assaults on opposition figures, and other forms of election fraud. However, with the state’s increased control over the media, these facts are not known to many Turkish citizens. In an interview with CNN released on April 18, 2017, under the title “Erdogan insists Turkey reforms don’t make him a dictator,” he stated—in a clear example of post-truth rhetoric—that the referendum did not represent “a step towards dictatorship.” Many democratic countries condemned the referendum and the electoral fraud accompanying it, as well as Turkey’s broader slide into authoritarianism. The US State Department issued a statement criticizing the referendum, highlighting the many voting irregularities.

However, in an unfortunate case of mixed messages, Trump called Erdogan to congratulate him on his victory, without mentioning any of the electoral problems or the slide toward dictatorship. Trump also expressed supporting words toward Putin, for instance praising Putin’s “strong control over a country” in a televised forum with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer. Additionally, when asked by former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough what he thought of Putin killing journalists who don’t agree with him, Trump sidestepped the question, saying, “I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.”

Given Trump’s praise and support for Erdogan and Putin, and the similarity of their post-truth tactics and media attacks, we should have grave concerns for the future of the US. I am not saying Trump will definitely take this path. He may change his stripes. He may stop calling the media “enemies of the people.” Still, Trump’s actions to date are similar to those of other leaders who put their nations on the path to authoritarianism.

The Media Deserve Some Blame

Let me be clear: the US media is far from innocent in its own decline. Even before Trump, Gallup showed a clear decrease in American trust in the media. Starting in the low 50s in the late 1990s, trust in the media gradually fell through the 2000s to end in the low 40s in the mid-2010s, before Trump’s intervention (see Fig. 4.3, above). According to Jonathan Ladd’s 2011 book Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, trust in the media was higher in the 1950s. The 1956 American National Election Study (ANES) found that only 27 percent of Americans believed newspapers were “unfair,” and 66 believed them to be “fair,” with 64 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of Republicans perceiving newspapers as “fair.” What explains the other elements of declining mass media influence besides criticism from Trump?

Beginning with Nixon, the Republican Party has a history of launching anti-media attacks. This is fundamental to understanding the disparity in trust in the media between Republicans and Democrats. For instance, in 1997, 64 percent of Democrats had trust in the media and only 41 percent of Republicans trusted the media, with Independents slightly closer to Democrats at 53 percent. This gap of around 25 percent, while fluctuating over the two decades to 2016, remained relatively steady before Trump. Then in 2016 the gap of trust widened by over 50 percent, with Democrats at 51 percent and Republicans at 14 percent. Nonetheless, despite these political differences, we see trust among Democrats and Republicans alike decreasing in the media throughout this period. So, we need to consider six other factors besides Republican criticism of the media, factors internal to the media industry itself.

Declining Revenues Led to Lower Budgets for Investigative Journalism

One of the biggest problems comes from the budget cuts in mainstream media’s investigative journalism in recent decades. To a large extent this has been driven by the rise of digital media. For example, a paper presented by James Hamilton at the Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media in 2009 reported that 2008 witnessed the disappearance of at least 15,970 newspaper jobs. Hamilton described how the cuts targeted investigative reporting most of all because of the expense associated with this area of reporting. He found that the number of full-time newspaper reporters covering state capitals decreased by 32 percent from 2003 to 2009. Over this same period, the membership rosters of Investigative Reporters and Editors fell from 5,391 to 3,695—more than 30 percent, according to a 2010 article by Mary Walton in the American Journalism Review. Walton’s article describes a former investigative reporter at the Palm Beach Post whose coverage of corruption on a local level put three county commissioners and others in jail, but who left due to a staff reduction in 2008 from 300 to 170, as he was on the verge of investigating a fourth commissioner. When asked by Walton what happens when people like him vanish, the reporter said, “The bad guys get away with stuff.” This research underscores how the deterioration in investigative reporting undermines trust in the mainstream media.

Concentration of Ownership

Another problem stems from media consolidation, well described in the 2009 Media Ownership and Concentration in America by Eli Noam. Already on the rise before the appearance of digital media, the Internet vastly accelerated media buyouts, along with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which facilitated media cross-ownership. Due to this act and the financial pressure of online media, the number of major media-holding companies decreased from 10 in 1996 to 6 in 2005, as described in Ben Bagdikian’s 2014 book. The number of radio station owners also decreased drastically, and their content has become much more standardized, as Anastasia Bednarski finds in a 2002 article. A piece by Dell Champlin and Janet Knoedler in the Journal of Economic Issues demonstrates that, as a result of media consolidation, news coverage has gone down both in quantity and quality, with the latter meaning that the reporting shifted more into the arena of “infotainment” and away from serious journalism. All of these factors undercut trust in the mainstream media.

Blurring the Boundary Between News Reporting and Opinion

More recently, the rise to prominence of opinion-driven reporting in certain mainstream media outlets has undermined the credibility of the journalistic profession. The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists includes phrases such as: “Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair”; “Journalists should be honest and courageous”; “Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify”; “Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information”; “Label advocacy and commentary” and so on. These worthwhile values have been compromised by the recent rise of “an opinion-driven free-for-all news culture stripped of traditional editorial values of accuracy and fairness,” according to Steven Barnett’s 2012 article. Barnett goes on to state that “the news channel that has most exploited American television’s freedom to be overtly partisan—Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel—has become renowned for undermining traditional tenets of truth-seeking in broadcast journalism.”

While Fox has led the way, other channels have followed. In a USA Today article on November 3, 2006, “Cable rantings boost ratings,” the author describes how such strategies, while first adopted by Fox, have since appeared elsewhere, for instance on MSNBC. Such opinion-driven reporting may boost ratings, as the USA Today article noted, but it takes away from the perception of journalists as referees, instead placing them as players in the political spin game.

False Equivalence

False equivalence is a mental error in which two completely opposing arguments appear to be logically equivalent when in fact they are not. Some reporters misinterpret “fair reporting” as if it means simply stating what different sources say about the issue, with no factual context. In cases where only one side of the story is actually correct, this practice undermines fairness, honesty, and accuracy. In short, it misleads. For instance, some reporters “balance” the views of climate scientists—whose findings clearly show human-caused climate change—with those of climate-change deniers, mostly funded by fossil fuel companies. Such false equivalence deceives readers by failing to highlight the fact that the scientific consensus for climate change is a remarkable 97 percent. Comedian John Oliver parodied such reporting on his show Last Week Tonight, in a mock debate pitting 3 climate deniers against 97 climate scientists crammed into a room. Herbert Gans’s 2014 article in the International Journal of Communication describes how such false equivalence functions in the political arena, where journalists report on claims made by different politicians as though they are equally valid. This approach conveys a false impression to readers when one politician is less radical and another is more radical, as when comparing the claims of a Tea Party Republican and those of a moderate Democrat.

False equivalence grew especially problematic with Trump, as related by Victor Pickard in his 2017 piece, “Media failures in the Age of Trump.” Many media venues, when covering Trump’s exaggerated claims and outright lies, also spent a similar amount of time covering Clinton’s lies, regardless of the evidence from reputable fact-checking websites that Clinton lied much less often and intensely than Trump. The audiences of these venues garnered the false impression that Clinton and Trump both lied very extensively, despite the reality of Clinton’s deception being about average among politicians.

Deceptive Headlines

Writing misleading headlines is an unethical practice, according to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Yet a 2009 study of headlines on health issues by Nikki Turner et al. analyzed 51 articles and found that 26 of them had inaccurate headlines and 6 were at least misleading when compared with the content of the article. That makes 61 percent deceptive headlines from the study. Deceptive headlines tend to be attention-grabbing and sensationalist, according to Ladd’s 2011 book. They are designed to get people to buy the newspaper or click on an article. Why does this happen? In most newsrooms, the editor who writes the headline is a different person than the journalist who writes the story. Often that person has a lot of headlines to write, so they themselves don’t read the whole articles, but just skim to find what they think is the main thrust, and then search for something attention grabbing. Two examples:

A 2014 survey by the American Press Institute reported that only 41 percent of Americans go beyond simply skimming the headline. That’s six out of ten who only look at the headline. Given this situation, we can see that most Americans would get the wrong impression from their exposure to news. Additionally, those who do read deeper and notice the headline is a distortion may feel less inclined to trust media reporting over all.

Here’s a case in which sensational headlines seriously misled the public: Regardless of their political affiliation, most who follow politics in any depth easily dismissed Trump’s series of Twitter accusations on March 4, 2017 that Barack Obama had ordered Trump Tower wiretapped before the 2016 election. Trump offered no evidence, but instead used inflammatory language such as calling Obama “sick” and “bad,” and requested that Congress conduct an investigation into the Obama administration. A deluge of articles from AP News and many other media outlets covered the story, with headlines describing Trump’s “startling allegation of abuse of power.” The articles themselves reported the lack of evidence, and an analysis that the claims were highly improbable. The impact? Four days after the first tweet, a March 8, 2017 Rasmussen Reports poll showed 44 percent of respondents considered it likely the allegation was true. Even after multiple denials by the FBI and other federal agencies, and debunking by reputable fact-checkers such as Factcheck.org and PolitiFact, a CBS News poll on March 29, 2017 found that 47 percent of respondents thought that the US government had deliberately surveilled Trump Tower in the campaign.

Hyper-Focus on Extreme Emotion and Outrage

“If it bleeds it leads.” A journalist I know at an international radio station told me this was the credo of every newsroom. The media relentlessly covers high-emotion stories: war, disaster, scandal, outrage. Why? Human nature. Bad news sells. We can’t help but slow down and rubberneck when we pass an accident on the highway. Evolution has fine-tuned us to pay attention when bad things happen, whether the destruction is due to a tornado, a shark, or the self-inflicted wound of a philandering politician. The move to the 24-hour news cycle (a feature of the digital age) has supercharged this tendency, priming journalists to report on sensational bad news as quickly as possible, and thus putting pressure on them to rush their fact-checking of sources. This leaves the media especially vulnerable to politicians who take advantage of this tendency. They can make headlines easily by declaring a threat where there is none, by slandering an opponent without basis, or by making any false claim. So long as it is outrageous enough to trigger fear, anger, or disgust, the media will report it. They simply can’t help themselves. They are like sharks that smell blood in the water and go into a feeding frenzy. The blood—the high emotion—seems to impair their judgment as they rush to get the story into print. Twitter has enabled politicians like Donald Trump to virtually hijack the nervous system of the mainstream media, feeding it regular jolts of outrage like a drug pusher dealing crack. Even when journalists know that the latest tweet is baseless, they are compelled to report it, and then pundits debate each false claim endlessly on cable TV. Even if baseless claims are corrected later in the article, as the illusory truth effect kicks in, the public more likely remembers the charge, while the correcting information fades.

This process feeds the powerful availability heuristic, which deceives people into thinking “what you see is all there is.” For example, in January 2019, Trump’s shutdown of the government over funding for his Mexico border wall dominated the media. Almost every outlet reported false claims he made about criminals crossing the border, a “humanitarian crisis” of trafficking, and blatant lies about the numbers of illegal crossings increasing, while in fact, according to the government’s statistics, illegal crossings were at historically low levels. The high drama of the whole situation kept the media hyper-focused on this issue. Meanwhile, Trump ended a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Russia and announced troop withdrawals in Syria, just to name two events underreported by the media in that period that are clearly of far greater importance than a spat over the wall. Even though Trump lost the congressional battle for his wall in early 2019, he deftly manipulated the news cycle, keeping the nation’s attention focused where he wanted it—and away from more important and alarming issues that deserved the media’s attention, and ours.

The Media Can Evolve Toward Pro-Truth Reporting, and You Can Help

Fortunately, honest and ethical journalists can change their reporting style. Trump keeps making claims with no evidence, and will keep doing so, because he gets exactly what he wants: millions of people believing his baseless allegations. Reframing the media coverage of Trump’s claims, and using techniques informed by behavioral science, would disincentivize Trump from making baseless statements instead of rewarding him. Rather than focusing on relating the details of the specific claims made by Trump, reporters should use news headlines and introductory paragraphs to foreground the pattern of our president systematically making claims lacking evidence. For instance, in the falsehoods about wiretapping, AP News could have run the headline “Trump Delivers Another Accusation Without Evidence, This Time Against Obama.” CNN could have introduced the story by focusing on Trump’s pattern of making serial allegations of immoral and illegal actions by his political opponents without any evidence, this time accusing his predecessor. Then, deeper in the article where the shallow skimmers do not reach, the story could have detailed the allegations made by Trump, backed up by facts.

The same approaches can be used by the media to address the problem of false equivalence and opinion-driven reporting. However, to do so, the media have to place their ethics code (reporting events fairly and accurately) above ratings. We have to recognize that’s not easy for media outlets that depend on click-based revenues to survive.

The media can do better. But they only will do better when the incentive for their survival changes. The media can evolve. They can become more aware of political attempts to manipulate their coverage and resist them. They can keep the public’s attention on the issues that actually have the greatest consequences for citizens—such as embarking on a new arms race, or creating a vacuum for terrorists in Syria.

You as a media consumer can make a difference. First, though, let’s redefine that relationship. The media in the United States are considered the Fourth Estate, after the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government. Although for the most part not funded by taxpayers, a free and ethical press is a foundation of any democracy. Why? Because without accurate and unbiased information, citizens can’t wisely evaluate the best policies, nor elect the best candidates. Around the world, authoritarian regimes persecute, imprison, and murder journalists who strive to tell the truth. In democratic, free nations, we should never take our media for granted, and never tolerate lax standards for reporting the truth.

What you can do:

  1. Pay for the media. Your taxes pay for the first three estates of your democracy. It’s up to you to pay for the fourth. Online subscriptions for newspapers are ludicrously inexpensive, about the equivalent of a few slices of pizza. Consider devoting the cost of a pizza each month to three or four media sources you trust. Incidentally, being a subscriber gives you much greater leverage when you write to the editors. Remembering myself as a college student surviving on ramen noodles, you might genuinely be unable to afford giving up those slices of pizza. In that case, at least make sure to unblock your ad blocker when you visit news sites where they get paid by the click, and encourage those around you who are eating sushi instead of ramen noodles to pay for quality journalism..
  2. Promote truth to the media. These days most news stories give you the option of adding a comment or emailing the journalist. Use this option to thank journalists who are vigilant about truth, as well as criticizing them when they fall short. As Tim, my co-author and a former journalist attests, feedback from readers has a huge impact. Let them know you value truth-first reporting. Along this line, you can encourage reporters and editors to take the Pro-Truth Pledge (see Chapter 7), to shift the incentives for them to orient toward truthful and accurate reporting.
  3. Police the media. When media venues feature misleading headlines, opinion-driven reporting, false equivalence, and hyper-focus on high emotion, write letters to the editor encouraging them to reframe their reporting so that the truth comes first—not the emotion. By doing so, you will help address the distrust in the referees of our political system, as well as create appropriate incentives for politicians to avoid false claims. You can assure media channels that they will get your loyalty if they put truth first. Broadcast media are even more responsive to their sponsors, so write to them if a broadcast journalist is particularly pernicious. Both Fox News and MSNBC have fired on-air talent when their shows have been called out for bad behavior, and advertisers have dropped them.

Pro-Truth Reporting for Journalists

If you are a journalist reading this book, thank you for your commitment to the truth. Too often, the odds seem stacked against you. You are rewarded for speed and sensationalism, not meticulously grinding through the lies, the spin, the conflicting evidence. You work on a deadline, yet the truth takes so much time. It’s important nonetheless to recognize that the media is undergoing a crisis of credibility. The President of the United States has attacked you as purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” At the same time, to his critics he has made abundantly clear how easily you can be manipulated. You cannot cling to today’s practices and hope to survive. As the current social media meme aptly puts it, “Evolve or die.” It’s no metaphor. On the African savannah, antelopes evolve to become faster and warier than their predators; lions evolve to become more stealthy and faster than antelopes. The dull and the slow get eaten.

Trump’s arrival has been like that of a super-predator at the waterhole. The old strategies for survival not only don’t work, they have been turned against you. Evolution has programmed you to cover crisis and outrage. Trump uses your impulse as a decoy to get you to focus all your attention where he wants it. In the past, uncovering outrageous lies of politicians used to kill the beast through contrition and perhaps resignation. Trump simply moves along, unscathed, from the carcass of one crisis and outrage to another. His blizzards of disinformation not only overwhelm your fact-checkers, they dull the senses of your readers and viewers. Also, his direct attacks on the media have not only startled you, they have revealed that you are ill-prepared to deal with an assault on your institutional credibility.

The good news is you have realized the game has changed. Media outlets have made several smart adaptations since the 2016 election:

To these laudable evolutions, here are four Rs for journalists, editors and producers to consider in implementing a pro-truth agenda:

  1. Resist reporting outrage. The media’s reflex is to report an outrageous tweet. Learn to perceive manipulative tweets and announcements as attempts to hijack your outlet. Otherwise, you are doing more harm than good. It’s not really sufficient to report that Trump made a false claim. Journalists need to learn not to cover a tweet that makes a false claim. This is hard, because the public is addicted to the outrage, and the story is easy to write. But too often you feed the addiction. Consider the actual news value of a tweet: if it spreads a conspiracy theory, smears a political rival, or arouses hatred for no reason—resist the temptation. Let the tweet die in obscurity.
  2. Redefine the concept of balance quantitatively so as to avoid false equivalence. Refuse to accept that “balanced reporting” is achieved by including any opposing point of view, no matter how much of an outlier. To help with this mental shift, don’t use the metaphor of the scales for balance. If you were reporting on the first manned flight orbiting the earth, would you have felt impelled, for the sake of balance, to include a quote from the Flat Earth Society? Instead, think of balance quantitatively, on a numeric scale. How many different voices are there on the issue you are reporting? If 97 percent of scientists agree that global warming is going to hit us in the next decade, and you only have room for quotes from three experts, the quantitative balance would not include a quote from a climate denier. Perhaps nuanced views from three climate scientists would give a more accurate spectrum of expert opinion. Think of it this way: You would have to quote 33 experts in your story in order to quantitatively justify quoting a single climate denier.
  3. Rush NOT to judgment. Mainstream journalists must become more aware that their biases expose them to the narrative fallacy—our tendency to want to fit whatever information we have available into a story that makes intuitive sense to us. Especially when a story breaks that seems to neatly fit those “hot-button” political issues. Failure to determine the relevant facts before publishing is no longer just an individual lapse: It feeds the Trumpian narrative that you are all “fake news.” Take the lesson of the Jussie Smollett hoax to heart, and treat every tempting narrative as a potential hoax. Resist the rush, and remember it is journalism itself that will be judged if you get the story wrong.
  4. Re-label opinion and news stories more distinctly. Ethical journalists know the difference between news and commentary and strive to keep their news stories objective. But their audiences often don’t make this distinction. This inadvertently feeds Trump’s narrative that the mainstream media is out to get him. As a Republican friend of my coauthor recently told him: “There were six stories bashing Trump in the NYT today, and only one factual story about him. I can’t believe how unfair the liberal media is!” The friend had tallied the headlines, unaware that these were mostly opinion pieces, not news reports. Part of the problem is that most people no longer read their news in a paper newspaper. On social media, there’s no easy way to tell news stories from opinion pieces. A story shows up on one’s feed simply as from the New York Times. If you click the link, you might find “Opinion” in tiny print next to the headline. The fix here is pretty simple: Use prominent labels. Similarly, broadcast media needs a much clearer distinction between news shows and commentary segments. Something on the screen at all times would help prevent viewers from making this mistake.

Important Terms Referenced in This Chapter

Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for and interpret new information in a way that conforms to our existing beliefs, and ignore or reject new information that goes against our current beliefs.

Illusory truth effect: a mental error that causes us to perceive something to be true when we hear it repeated frequently and persistently, regardless of whether it is objectively true, or whether or not we are presented with evidence supporting it.

False equivalence: the intention to evaluate all sides of an issue as equal; this undermines fairness, honesty, and accuracy in cases where one perspective on the story is actually correct while the others are false.

Narrative fallacy: our tendency to want to fit whatever information we have available into a story that makes intuitive sense to us.

Availability bias: only considering significant what is in front of us; this bias deceives people into falsely thinking “what you see is all there is.”