Chapter Ten

Brave New World of #FakeNews
(and Chilling Efforts to Censor It)

After a campaign riddled with smears from start to finish, many believed the election would bring a welcome respite from the whole sordid mess. That the media diet would return to normal, tamer fare. But it turns out Campaign 2016 was just the appetizer.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking victory, forces on the left and right desperately seek to process what just happened and how. After all, the most powerful and well-funded propagandists in politics—liberals, conservatives, and the media—have been soundly defeated. Made into fools. Schooled by a political amateur. Now they’re on a new mission. They must deconstruct what went wrong. Find new relevance. Win back their power.

It’s in this context that the term fake news emerges at the forefront of nearly every postelection political and news discussion. Until now, many successful smears relied heavily on a grain of truth. A kernel of fact that could be mined from the past, manipulated, exaggerated, or spun into something larger and more destructive. But in the fake news business, all a smear artist needs are a good story, a Facebook account, and a website that looks something like an actual new source. Transactional journalism and its reliance on the services of the traditional news media are no longer mandatory. Fictitious stories and falsehoods can quickly go viral through social media and in obscure corners of the Internet. Without the real-news middleman.

This is the context for the new battleground in the smear wars. But before the soldiers and generals have even girded their loins and donned their armor, they’ve already begun fighting to control the definition of what, exactly, constitutes fake news. Much like the smear itself, its definition depends on where you sit.

It’s not as if there’s a supreme dictionary authority that gets to decide how to define fake news for everyone (though some are trying). From its inception, it’s clear that liberals, who are first to heavily promote the phrase “fake news,” mean to reference conservative misinformation and right-wing websites. And there’s certainly plenty of that. Agence France-Presse declares matter-of-factly that it’s the right wing that’s guilty of fake news, and that Obama has been plagued by eight years of “false scandals over his place of birth that have forced him to play media-critic-in-chief.” Some liberals also blame demonstrably false narratives—reports that she was seriously ill, about to be indicted by the FBI, and using a body double—for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

But Trump and conservatives counterpunch by quickly applying their own idea of fake news as committed by the mainstream media and left-wing websites. Plenty of that, too, including reports of Trump’s supposed links to Russia president Vladimir Putin and white supremacists.

Suffice to say those accused of producing or being fake news tend to define it in terms that exclude themselves and point to the other guys. To complicate matters, we have to consider the possibility that double agents are generating fake news about themselves to justify the movement to crack down on supposedly fake news. There’s already evidence of such twisted plots. Shortly before and after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported an uptick in hate-related crimes. There were dozens of shocking news accounts of pro-Trump racist and Islamophobic violence. In New York City, there was news of an eighteen-year-old Muslim-American woman mercilessly harassed by Trump supporters who tried to steal her hijab veil on the subway. There were news reports about Trump supporters spray-painting “Trump Rules” and “Black Bitch” on an African-American woman’s car, and “Trump” next to a Nazi swastika on a storefront window. There were news reports about a black church in Mississippi burned and spray-painted with the words “Vote Trump.” Many in the press blamed and harangued Trump for these incidents. Won’t you condemn what your supporters are doing? The left-wing propaganda site Daily Kos published an actual headline that read, “Trump Empowers White Supremacists to Kill as a Matter of Policy, then Remains Silent About It.” Trump responds to the media outcry against him by publicly imploring those committing hateful acts to “stop it.”

But many of the hate crimes are soon revealed as fake news staged by Trump opponents to look as though they’d been committed by his supporters. The Muslim-American “victim” in the subway was ultimately arrested for making up the account, according to New York City police. An African-American man was eventually arrested in the case of the spray-painted “racist” messages in Philadelphia. Another black man was arrested and charged with defacing and setting fire to the Mississippi church. He was a member of the congregation! When these arrests are made, the press doesn’t blame or harangue Clinton or Obama. Nor does it ask them to apologize for the violent acts and false accusations, as they’ve done to Trump. Nor does the press offer its own apologies for its initial rush to unequivocally blame Trump supporters for the crimes, despite lack of evidence.

Liberals and conservatives declare war on one another in the media over fake news. Conservative websites and social media explode with outrage, asking, How can the New York Times credibly report on fake news after the fallout over its own front-page exposé about Trump’s mistreatment of women during the campaign? (The “victims” in the article later defended Trump and said the newspaper took their words out of context.) Conservatives ask, Where’s the outrage over the media’s mantra that Trump had “no electoral path to victory,” and other false narratives designed to defeat him? What about the major newspaper that falsely reported on election night that Trump had lost Michigan?

On January 20, 2017, Time magazine seems to inadvertently prove the point when one of its reporters, Zeke Miller, erroneously reports that incoming president Trump has removed a bust statue of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. The incendiary claim is born of a bias that used to be verboten in responsible journalism: Miller later explained that he looked around, didn’t see the bust, and then, without verifying his suspicions, tweeted out the false information that the bust was gone. He also reported the “story” to the entire national press “pool,” meaning it was widely circulated. When the White House responds by quickly posting a photo on social media showing the bust was still very much in the Oval Office, it’s revealed that Miller hasn’t followed the most basic tenets every college journalism student is taught: check your facts. Not long ago, such an amateur error would have excluded the offending reporter from work at any reputable publication. But in today’s environment, it’s considered a routine part of business. There’s no evidence that Miller’s publisher took any punitive actions against him and, as of this writing, he was still listed as working for Time.

When conservatives present gross examples like this as evidence of fake news, a new party line develops among liberals. Liberal commentators defend the acts of fake news, arguing that “honest mistakes” are far less serious than people knowingly generating fake news online (like conservatives). I could easily argue the opposite: mistakes at “real” news organizations are more harmful, because more readers are likely to believe them than off-brand online sites. Regardless, both sides continue to define fake news in a way that lends sympathy to their interests.

Although fake news may appear to many Americans to have emerged quite suddenly, it’s been taking root for years. It’s the logical evolution of a phenomenon that’s been shaped, stretched, and fertilized with money and ingenuity.

The Roots of Fake News

John H. Johnson, author of Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day, divides fake news into five categories: 1) news that’s entirely false; 2) news that’s slanted and biased; 3) pure propaganda; 4) stories that misinterpret or misuse data; and 5) imprecise and sloppy reporting.

Under these definitions, fake news has been embedded in our culture for decades. Long before the Internet, newspaper magnates hyped stories for circulation or in secret partnership with the government. As noted in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and William Randolph Hearst, of the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner, competed for readers in the late 1890s with “exposés, stunts, comics, sports coverage, women’s features, and exciting accounts of foreign conflicts. They believed that war, especially the way they reported it, sold papers.” Some critics accused the papers of doing the bidding of President William McKinley to shape popular perceptions and pump up sentiment for a U.S. declaration of war against Spain.

In the midtwentieth century, the supermarket rags gave populist appeal to blatantly fake news, with front-page images of aliens abducting and impregnated unsuspecting (usually large-breasted) earthling women. The National Enquirer published its first issue as a sensational tabloid in 1953. Weekly World News sported headlines like “Garden of Eden Found. U.S. Grows Trees from Seeds.” From the Globe: “Bush on Cocaine in the White House.” The tabloids are the “clickbait” of the pre-Internet era, and they developed a devoted following. Presumably most readers believed none of what they read in the rags; certainly a few believed all of it. And every once in a great while, the tabloids broke true news. In 1987, the Enquirer alone had the moxie to put a tail on Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. It unearthed his affair with model Donna Rice, complete with a photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap aboard his yacht, Monkey Business. Hart promptly withdrew from the race. Over the years, slandered celebrities gripe about the tabloids, and some sue, but nobody speaks seriously of “curating” them, removing them from store shelves, or censoring them from public view.

In the 1990s, news organizations exploit the new technology of email, blogs, and websites to vastly expand their audiences, and viewers increasingly turn to online sources for entertainment and information. The new millennium brings a social media revolution, most notably the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As we’ve seen, they provided the means by which smears can be accomplished with unprecedented speed, breadth, and deadly precision. A rumor that would have circulated among a relative few can now develop a global following. Technological tricks are used to alter images and create new, false realities to fool the most discriminating eye. On December 14, 2012, a shooter barges into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murders twenty children and six school employees. Multiple blogs, videos, and social media sites quickly begin circulating conspiracy theories, insisting the whole event was staged by actors in a hoax drummed up by the government. According to the theorists, the supposedly dead children have since shown up as a group, disguised but very much alive and well, at White House events and football halftime shows.

When false information like this crosses over from the shadowy corners of the Internet to be believed by large swaths of readers, it’s officially “fake news” (although it wasn’t called that until recently). Sometimes fake news is picked up and reported seriously in the domain of once-respected straight news outlets. How? The news organizations may be guilty of not checking facts carefully enough. They could be in a rush to beat the competition. Or they might be advancing an agenda. Long before 2016 one finds countless, blatant examples of damaging misinformation making its way to the mainstream through reckless or malicious disregard for truth.

In 1996 a news media frenzy wrongly links security guard Richard Jewell to the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. In truth, Jewell was a hero, spotting an unattended backpack and moving people away from it before the bomb inside exploded.

Also in 1996, I was able to call out a shocking incident of government-generated fake news. It happened after I broke the story on the CBS Evening News that Chinese spies had obtained design plans to our most advanced nuclear warhead, called the W-88. I knew from the best sources that U.S. officials, try as they might, had not been able to identify a suspect in the case. But as soon as my story ignited a global scandal, the government offered up the name of the supposed spy: Taiwan-born scientist Wen Ho Lee, who worked at the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory. Government officials “leaked” Lee’s name to national news media, including me—as the reporter who’d broken the original story. Other reporters widely reported that Lee was the likely spy. I took a more circumspect approach because my inside sources were firm on the point that Lee wasn’t really a credible suspect. They told me that the Clinton administration had been embarrassed by the theft and needed to make it seem as if the culprit had been caught. The FBI claimed Lee failed a lie detector test, and that they had their man. But it wasn’t true. I was later able to exclusively report that the FBI lied about Lee’s polygraph, which he’d actually passed with flying colors.

In the end, Lee was never charged with spying, and he sued the federal government for unlawfully leaking his name to news organizations. Ultimately the government and several news organizations paid Lee a settlement: the Washington Post for reporting by Walter Pincus, the New York Times for reporting by James Risen, the Los Angeles Times for reporting by Bob Drogin, the Associated Press for reporting by Josef Hebert, and ABC for reporting by Pierre Thomas. The news outlets said their reporters did nothing wrong but that they agreed to pay a settlement so they wouldn’t have to disclose the names of the government sources who’d leaked Lee’s name. The big takeaway for me was the realization that our own government could be guilty of fingering a fake suspect and generating a fake story about him—and get it all widely reported in the news. The government isn’t beyond telling big lies.

There’s fake news again on September 11, 2001. Reporting in the confusion after the terrorist attacks, CBS News’ Jim Stewart erroneously reports that the doomed, hijacked Flight 93 went down “in the vicinity of [presidential retreat] Camp David.” But it crashed nowhere near there. An honest mistake based on bad information or a hastily drawn conclusion.

Three years later, in 2004, CBS News anchor Dan Rather gets caught in a major case of fake news, using forged documents for a 60 Minutes II report disparaging President George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era military service. Prior to the segment’s airing, a CBS manager had shown me the documents, not realizing they were forgeries, and telling me I might be assigned to do a big follow-up story for the Evening News. I immediately flagged the material as suspicious. I saw that the 1973-dated documents were clearly computer-generated rather than typed with a 1970s-era typewriter. Other red flags: they were purportedly signed by a now-deceased lieutenant colonel, and the format and language in them deviated from military documents I’d reviewed in the past. I refused to touch the story. Ultimately the documents were exposed as fakes. Dan Rather and several producers lost their jobs over the controversy.

I’m inadvertently wrapped up in another fake news story in 2008, when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is repeatedly quoted uncritically in the press describing how she bravely dodged sniper fire on a trip to war-torn Bosnia as first lady twelve years before. She is apparently attempting to distinguish herself as more battle-ready than her opponent, Barack Obama. However, I had accompanied Clinton on that trip to Bosnia as a reporter in 1996. There had been no sniper fire. The events described by Clinton were wholly fabricated. On March 24, 2008, I prove it by showing the archive video from the Bosnia trip in a story for the CBS Evening News. After the newscast, Clinton apologizes and explains she repeatedly misremembered the events because she had been “overtired.” The thing is, there were many other reporters on that Bosnia trip who knew that Clinton’s story was fake—but stayed silent. Why?

On April 23, 2013, the Associated Press reports breaking news on its Twitter account: “Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama Is Injured.” That leads to instantaneous panic and a major Wall Street reaction. Within minutes, the S&P 500 stock index loses more than $136 billion. It turns out it was all a hoax. AP’s Twitter account had been hacked.

One of the most far-reaching and insidious fake news stories in recent times surrounds the police shooting death of suspect of Michael Brown, an African-American man, in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. The media widely reports bogus witness accounts of Brown getting shot while supposedly holding up his hands in surrender. The reportedly unjustified nature of the shooting sparks violent riots, stokes the Black Lives Matter movement, and creates a new protest gesture known as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” It’s followed by a rash of black men ambushing and murdering police officers around the nation. But in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Attorney General Eric Holder, reverses its initial claims and exonerates the white Ferguson police officer who’d shot Michael Brown. The DOJ determines the witnesses who claimed Brown’s hands were raised when he was shot weren’t telling the truth. But due to the original, widespread misreporting of the fake news, serious misconceptions about Brown’s death persist to this day. Also in 2015, there’s more fake news during riots in Baltimore. People tweet and retweet photographs purporting to show looted and destroyed storefronts. It turns out some of the images had been recycled from entirely unrelated events. For example, one photo posted as if it were showing a trashed KFC restaurant in Baltimore was actually a picture from a bombed-out restaurant in Pakistan.

In November 2014 there’s fake news with major repercussions. Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely reports on a sensational case of a fraternity gang rape that turns out to be not only questionable, but so unsubstantiated that the publication later retracts the article, and a jury finds Erdely guilty of malice in a defamation lawsuit.

On December 7, 2016, there’s another fake use of a photo in a major news event. NBC’s Today is reporting on the mistrial of a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer who shot a black suspect. As the news show host tells viewers that Charleston’s mayor is appealing for calm, the network shows a still photo of an angry mob of demonstrators. It makes it appear as though the city is on the verge of riots! But it turns out the provocative photograph wasn’t taken after the mistrial, and the scene isn’t anywhere near Charleston. It is a picture of people protesting after an unrelated incident in Baltimore in 2015. Viewers notice NBC’s error and take to social media.

“Wow, @TODAYshow. Hire some fact checkers. Pretty lame to share Baltimore 2015 photo in today’s story about Charleston mistrial,” tweets one viewer. “What’s up with this Today Show?” asks another. “Why use a picture of Baltimore when reporting on a Charleston situation? Poor reporting!?” A week earlier, NBC was among the news organizations that also misreported the police officer’s trial had ended in mistrial—a week before the judge actually declared a mistrial.

Amid incidents like these arousing widespread mistrust of the news, NBC News anchor Brian Williams admits that a war story he’s told for twelve years . . . is fake. He has claimed he was in a helicopter in 2003 that was hit by enemy fire over Iraq. But it turns out no missile ever hit his chopper. Stars and Stripes reveals the fabrication in 2015 based on accounts of soldiers who were there. NBC removes Williams from the anchor chair and he apologizes for telling the tale. For skeptical viewers, it’s irrefutable proof of willful dishonesty at the highest levels in the media. If NBC’s top newsman would make up such stories, how can we rely on the news to be true? After a suspension, Williams is reinstated in the anchor chair at MSNBC—where he later criticizes the Trump team for spreading fake news.

There are other practices that some define as fake news. One of them is the common misapplication of anti-immigrant to Trump and his policies. In using the term, partisans and many reporters conflate legal immigrants with illegal immigrants, as if they’re one and the same. To me, it’s kind of like saying a burglar is the same thing as an invited visitor to your home. It’s simply untrue. Whether one likes Trump or not, I find it difficult to logically make the case that Trump is anti-immigrant. He has repeatedly stated that he’s pro-immigration; he married two immigrants (his current wife and an ex-wife) and therefore has children who are the children of immigrants. There’s similar common misuse of other terms against Trump. His enemies try to portray him as anti-Semitic despite that fact that his daughter is a converted Orthodox Jew, and that—as president—Trump immediately cultivated a friendlier relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu than the previous administration ever had. Lastly, Trump’s temporary immigration moratorium is mistakenly described far and wide as a “Muslim ban,” despite the fact that most of the world’s Muslims are unaffected, the countries it applied to were first identified under the Obama administration, and, most important, millions of Muslims are still very much welcome and living in the United States. If there were a Muslim ban then logic dictates that it would—well, ban Muslims. A few years back, responsible news reporters wouldn’t give themselves license to use pejorative and challenged terms to describe a politician’s positions (without attributing them as opinion), especially if the politician himself disputed the descriptions. But under today’s loosening definition of what’s acceptable in the news, most anything goes.

“Russia, Russia, Russia!”

Coincident with Trump’s election is a concerted effort by Democrats and many in the media to convince the public that Russian president Vladimir Putin himself successfully intervened to put Trump in office, that Russia somehow “hacked” the U.S. elections, and that Trump and his consorts have long been conspiring with Russia to do unknown illegal things. The Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, raised the specter during the campaign. In a letter to the FBI in August 2016, Reid complained that the Russians may try to “falsify official election results.” In September, Hillary Clinton joined the chorus, telling reporters, “I’m really concerned about the credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections.” But when Trump raised the idea that the election could be “rigged” in some way, Democrats ridiculed him and claimed he was “whining.” At a White House news conference, President Obama said, “no serious person out there who [sic] would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections . . . I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.” Obama also said Trump’s suggestion of a “rigged election” was unheard-of. “I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place,” said Obama in the October 2016 news conference. “It’s unprecedented.” (Except that Hillary Clinton had already done so first.) The media heralds Obama’s remarks. Left-leaning Politico and NPR quote the president and tell Trump to “Stop whining.” The liberal website Slate headlines its article “Watch Barack Obama’s Masterful Donald Trump ‘Rigging’ Takedown.”

In the wake of the election, allegations of Russian interference reach a fever pitch. Many in the news media treat it as a proven fact rather than an allegation or theory, although the public evidence is lacking. “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking,” reads a New York Times headline, jumping on the propaganda train. “How Russia ‘Hacked’ Us in 2016,” reads Forbes.

The final week of December 2016, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security release a joint thirteen-page report describing “Russian Malicious Cyber Activity.” It makes the case that two hacking groups believed tied to the Russian government were involved in hacking into the Democratic National Committee system during the campaign, providing thousands of emails through WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange strongly denies that the leak came from Russia, stating, “Our source is not the Russian government . . . we didn’t get it from a state.” Former British ambassador Craig Murray backs up Assange’s version: “I know who leaked them. I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.” The differing claims don’t stop the online media from declaring one side to be correct and the other to be lying. Left-wing Vox describes WikiLeaks unequivocally as “the source through which Russia released the hacked emails to the public,” as if there were no dispute over the facts.

For my part, I decide to look past the media reports to see if I can separate fact from fake by looking at the existing evidence. First, let me be clear: Do I think it’s possible Russia tried to influence the outcome of our elections? Absolutely. In fact, I consider it quite likely. Not because of the unsubstantiated conclusions in the press, but because intelligence officials I trust tell me that Russia and other nations have attempted to influence our elections for decades, the same way we’ve often dabbled in influencing foreign elections. My sources also tell me that, historically, they consider China to be a more egregious offender. If you’ve watched politics long enough, you may remember the scandal broken by the Washington Post in 1996. The Post reported evidence of China directing contributions to the DNC during the presidential campaign between Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole—a violation of U.S. law. Over time, Taiwan-born Maria Hsia, a fundraiser for Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, was convicted of illegal campaign fundraising; Taiwan-born Charlie Trie was convicted of improperly attempting to give large donations to the Clintons’ legal defense fund; Taiwan-born Johnny Chung was convicted of violating election law after making large donations to the DNC (which were later returned); and Chinese-born John Huang—a DNC fundraiser and Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration—was convicted of campaign finance fraud.

Still, it’s quite a leap for the news media to accept the notion that Russia actually got Trump elected, at least based on the public evidence at the time. First, the persistent claims that the “election was hacked” is a misnomer. There were no standing allegations by U.S. officials that the Russians (or anyone else) “hacked” into our elections system or altered vote counts. Even assuming the Russians were proven to be behind the “hacking” of DNC emails, it would be hard to show that it somehow “affected the election” or “helped Donald Trump win.” For example, one would have to prove that a certain number of people in key states who voted for Trump were convinced to do so based solely on the email leaks (or that people who ultimately didn’t vote for Clinton had been convinced by the emails). It would seem difficult to devise a scientific poll that could figure that out. Further, one would have to believe the emails somehow managed to be successful in only providing Trump an edge in the electoral vote but not the popular vote (which Clinton won). And finally, one would have to believe the emails somehow selectively swayed voters in key swing states, but not voters in states where Clinton won. In covering the news, journalists aren’t supposed to report suppositions as unattributed facts, even if they consider them likely to be true. But rules that used to be standard-bearers of journalism are cast aside as the Russian drumbeat continues in the media, unabated.

On November 25, 2016, a Washington Post headline reads, “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ during Election, Experts Say.” The article, by Craig Timberg, goes on to cite research from a new, mysterious website called PropOrNot (as in “propaganda or not”), which describes itself as a resource for “assembling tools and information to help identify and neutralize Russian propaganda.” PropOrNot claims millions of Americans have been deceived in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign,” and lists supposed Russian disinformation outlets, including many that were notably critical of Hillary Clinton, such as WikiLeaks, Infowars, and the Drudge Report. The article becomes the most widely read story on the Post website, and a top-circulated article on social media.

But the next day, the Post is inundated with criticism. The Intercept accuses the newspaper of promoting a “blacklist” based on the “claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being ‘routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.’ ” PropOrNot’s agenda, say critics, appears to be to spur formal McCarthy-like government inquiries of entities accused of being Russian agents because they supported “policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone.” The credibility of the Post article and PropOrNot quickly crumble. The Intercept says it “contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about its team, but received only this reply: ‘We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon] . . . We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.’ ” Numerous organizations listed as being “allied” with PropOrNot on its website tell the Intercept they never heard of it before the Post story. The Post ends up publishing an embarrassing editor’s note. It reads, in part:

A number of those [websites on PropOrNot’s Russia propaganda list] have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.

In other words, as it claimed to draw attention to fake news, the Post may very well have gotten duped by, or been party to, fake news. Of the kerfuffle, the New Yorker writes, “the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier” than the prospect of Russian hacks.

The alleged Russia connection to Trump is further stoked by controversial reporting in January 2017 by CNN and BuzzFeed about unsubstantiated allegations against Trump in a “dossier” that was unverified and contained known errors. The incendiary documents claim Russia has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for years. They also claim the Russians have documented weird sexual acts by Trump, and report that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly met with Russian officials in Prague in the Czech Republic. Cohen disputes the claim, saying he’s never been to the Czech Republic in his life and certainly didn’t meet Russian officials there. He even offers up his passport to prove it. It turns out the dossier had been compiled for an opposition research firm called Fusion GPS. One insider tells Daily Caller that the head of Fusion GPS is a notorious “professional smear campaigner.” The dossier had been shopped to countless news organizations over a period of months. It was, perhaps, a significant feat that smear artists were able to get the oppo research product so widely covered in the media.

With the Russia narrative taking a firm grip on America in the news media, journalists and pundits begin to routinely refer to Russian interference in the election, and Trump’s Russia connections, as if proven. The DNC issues daily email blasts and “War Room” updates ferreting out and attacking any and all Trump administration contacts with Russians. In February 2017, Obama intel officials leak to the press that they had eavesdropped on a pre-inauguration phone call between Trump’s national security adviser, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. After the call becomes public, Flynn backs off his earlier claim that he hadn’t discussed current U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak. He’s subsequently forced out of the Trump administration because he had misled Vice President Mike Pence on that point. Next, Democrats go after Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions after it’s learned he had two meetings with Ambassador Kislyak during the course of the campaign but didn’t acknowledge them when asked at his Senate nomination hearings. (Sessions later says it was an oversight and recused himself from any investigation into Russian influence in U.S. elections.)

Flynn and Sessions should have disclosed all of their contacts with Russian officials. But once again, I find it a leap to conclude they were involved in illegal or improper conspiracies with Russia. Contact with Russia hardly equates to collusion. I remember President Obama’s infamous “hot-mic” moment in 2012 in which he was overheard familiarly telling Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d have “more flexibility” to negotiate with then–prime minister Putin after the election. I happen to know from firsthand sources that in the first six months of the 2016 election year, Obama secretary of state John Kerry communicated with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov more frequently than their counterparts had ever done in recent memory. (They had thirty-seven phone calls and four meetings, I’m told. A large part of the discussions involved the United States and Russia possibly coordinating on military action in Syria, according to my sources.) Yet frequent contacts and coordination are not proof that Russia was in the tank for Democrats, or vice versa. Nor were the many meetings held between the Russian ambassador and leading Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer.

If Trump’s collusion with Russia is independently proven with evidence, it will be a news story like no other, and worthy of unprecedented reporting efforts. Until and unless that time comes, any allegations should be treated as such and attributed to their various sources. But that’s not how it seems to work in the brave new world of fake news. Today, if enough pundits, operatives, and media parrot the same narrative, it becomes incorporated into the fabric of the news as an accepted fact.

On March 5, 2017, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, seems to blow the lid off all the news reports to date that concluded the Trump campaign had a proven role in fixing the election. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asks Clapper if there is evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia. “Not to my knowledge,” replied Clapper. He adds that he saw “no evidence of such collusion” while he was in the Obama administration.

The Heyday of Fake News

If fake news (by other names) has always been around, why does it suddenly become the stuff of daily headlines toward the end of the 2016 campaign? The trail is fascinating and most enlightening. I trace the public ignition of the movement to September 13, 2016, and a group called First Draft, which announced a “partner network” to tackle “malicious hoaxes and fake news reports” that “are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways.” The group’s goal seems to be to separate wheat from chaff. To prevent unproven conspiracy talk like Pizzagate from showing up in ordinary Internet searches or trending on popular social media sites. To relegate today’s version of the alien baby story to a special Internet oblivion.

But you and I know that little happens by accident . . . ideas put before us are usually put there for a reason. When determining possible motivation behind any movement, it’s helpful to know who’s funding it. I learn that First Draft was founded in the United Kingdom in 2015 with primary backing from Google. The executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is Hillary backer Eric Schmidt. Alphabet was Hillary’s second-largest campaign contributor. According to internal campaign emails, Google offered up use of its jet to Clinton during her campaign. Schmidt and his team were tasked with helping build Clinton’s campaign website. He also submitted “notes” to the campaign regarding his desire to help get Hillary elected, and outlining recommendations as to how she should organize her campaign. Therefore, is it unreasonable to think that Google’s First Draft venture, which started up at the beginning of the 2016 election cycle and became the first to dive into the anti–“fake news” narrative, is driven by those seeking to advance Clinton and related political interests?

First Draft describes itself on its website as “a non-profit working on solutions to the challenges associated with trust & truth in the digital age.” Its partners include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and CNN, primarily left-leaning entities. I search for First Draft’s tax filings, which nonprofits are required to publicly disclose, but I can’t find them. When I contact the group, a spokesman tells me that First Draft hasn’t actually obtained nonprofit status yet—but expects to receive it soon.

Exactly one month after First Draft announces its initiative, President Obama advances the cause with a pitch at the White House Frontiers Conference, held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He blames a “wild, wild, west” media environment for destroying rational discourse online. “We are going to have to rebuild within this wild, wild west of information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” declares the president. His use of the bully pulpit to focus attention on the subject is part of what I see as a calculated agenda. There’s been no grassroots demand from the public. At the time, ordinary Americans aren’t screaming for self-appointed curators to apply their version of ultimate “truth” on the rest of us. This is the invention of special interests. From that point forward, the topic of fake news dominates headlines on a daily basis. It’s quite suddenly portrayed as a top challenge facing American democracy today.

In November 2016, President Obama continues the hard sell against fake news. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not . . . we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he remarks. “If everything seems to be the same, no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for.” The declaration smacks of irony. For example, it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama himself promised—and the media uncritically reported—“if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” PolitiFact called it the Lie of the Year.

It’s no surprise to me when David Brock’s name next turns up prominently in the anti–fake news movement. He’s jumping aboard the train. Or just maybe—he’s conducting it. On December 5, 2016, Huffington Post publishes an opinion piece from him that seems to blame conservative fake news for Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat. Brock writes that fake news is “an existential threat to our democracy” and adds, “for the first time in our history, we have a minister of disinformation, [Trump adviser] Steve Bannon, who commanded a vast proto-fascist media empire, operating from a plum perch in the West Wing.”

The next day, Brock holds a conference call detailing his plan to remake his flagship Media Matters into an effort that pivots from being a Fox antagonist into an arbiter of “alt-right” and fake news outlets (all conservative, of course). Brock says he’ll work to pressure Facebook and Google to better filter out fake news. “[T]he first order of business is for some of these companies to adopt some standards and clean their own house,” he says. Brock later criticizes the devastating, unsubstantiated rumors about his ex-boyfriend’s pizza parlor, which was wrapped up in the Pizzagate fake news scandal. I find it an uncanny coincidence that there’s a Brock connection to Pizzagate, which has become the poster child for “fake news,” just as Brock happens to emerge to lead the anti–fake news movement.

Regardless, we now have the answer to the question of how Brock intends to reinvent himself after failing, twice, to get Hillary elected president. Counting just two of his super PACs, he’s collected and spent more than $50 million in donor money in the four years from 2012 to 2016. How does he plan to recover from the high-cost failures, restore his image, find new relevance, and keep donor money rolling in? Apparently through creating and leading an aggressive campaign against his idea of (conservative) “fake news.”

Brock’s announcement is understandably viewed with skepticism by many who know him. “The ultimate huckster has announced he’s going to lead the fight against fake news,” quips one observer I know who has followed Brock’s antics for years. A conservative blogger writes, “Virtually everything that David Brock does would qualify as ‘fake news’ under any objective criteria,” pointing to Brock’s efforts to use paid trolls to “gaslight” Bernie Sanders supporters and others who criticized Clinton on social media.

A day after Brock’s conference call, he resigns from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which, during his brief tenure, was transformed from watchdog into a highly partisan campaign tool to attack Republicans. “Due to my stepped up political activities in the American Bridge opposition research super PAC, I decided to step off CREW’s board to ensure its public reputation for non-partisanship,” Brock says in a statement.

The next day, the intensely political nature of the growing movement is underscored when Hillary personally jumps aboard the anti–fake news train. On December 8, 2016, she speaks to reporters after visits with members of Congress. She claims she’s appalled by “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” Again, there’s irony, since Clinton herself has a long-standing relationship with fake news. She’d falsely blamed a YouTube video for the September 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attacks while acknowledging in private emails that Islamic extremists were to blame. She’d falsely said she dodged sniper fire in Bosnia. And she’d falsely claimed she never handled classified information on her private email servers—the FBI found 2,093 classified emails, including some that were top secret; 193 were formally classified at the time they were sent.

In her appearance at the Capitol, Clinton tells reporters, “It is now clear that so-called fake news can have real world consequences.” She’s referring to the arrest of a gunman who fired shots at the pizza restaurant named in Pizzagate. The suspect was apparently motivated by online fake news reports. “Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities,” Clinton continues. “It’s a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly. . . . It’s imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.” Clinton’s terminology, particularly her dark description of “danger,” evokes one of Brock’s earlier smear campaigns. In 2010, he’d argued that the rhetoric of Fox News personality Glenn Beck endangered lives and democracy. “Fox has allowed Glenn Beck’s show to become an out of control vehicle for the potential incitement of domestic terrorism,” Brock wrote at the time, in a joint press release with donor George Soros. “No American should be quiet about these developments—the degradation of our media and the reckless endangerment of innocent lives.”

The news coverage given to Brock’s fake news focus provides fresh evidence of how he’s truly set himself apart in the smear industry. As a political operative, he seems able to pick up the phone or send an email and get his message covered in outlets ranging from Politico to the New York Times. There are no other liberals or conservative counterparts in the smear game who seem to hold similar sway in the mainstream press.

Further complicating the questions of who is working to establish fake news as a cause célèbre and why—are the ticklish entanglements among the government officials, news outlets, nonprofits, and Internet corporations pushing the effort: Can these entities that have such vested political and financial interests really become trusted curators of news?

We’ve already established that Google is no political bystander. Before its connections to the Hillary campaign, it advised Obama and its representatives were invited to more than 420 closed-door meetings in the Obama White House. The government is hardly an impartial actor in the curating equation, either. Consider the May 2016 New York Times article quoting top Obama adviser Ben Rhodes seeming to brag about manipulating a young, inexperienced press corps. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” says Rhodes. “They literally know nothing.” The article also describes a “soft Orwellian vibe” produced as “Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once.” A Rhodes assistant divulges some strategic secrets, telling the Times, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple [of Washington reporters and columnists], and you know I wouldn’t want to name them. . . .” He goes on to say he uses the reporters to plant positive spin on negative narratives, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

Days after Brock and Clinton announce they’re going after fake news, Facebook cracks. The social media site announces new steps to curb the spread of fake news. CBS News reports it’s the result of “months of public pressure.” As far as I can tell, the “months of public pressure” came not from the public at large, but from special interests executing an orchestrated campaign. Indeed, Brock would later tell donors that his Media Matters group was largely responsible for forcing Facebook’s hand.

Facebook’s new plan includes collaborating with Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, ABC News, FactCheck.org, the Associated Press, and Snopes. If you’ve read this far, you already know the possible perils of this idea from a neutrality standpoint: it relies on some of the very organizations that have gotten caught in compromising situations, engaged in transactional journalism, or reported biased and incorrect news themselves.

According to Facebook, each fact-checking entity will be “given access to a tool . . . to evaluate stories that may be inaccurate.” If the chosen fact-checkers agree a story is misleading, it will get a “disputed” label and link to an article explaining why it’s supposedly false. In a test run, disputed articles generate a pop-up warning that reads, “Disputed by 3rd parties. Before you share this story you might want to know that independent fact checkers disputed its accuracy.” Facebook’s “independent” fact-checkers could be ABC, which has been accused of shelving or skewing negative stories about its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company; misreported that there was a possible link between the conservative Tea Party and the killer in a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012; and routinely allowed television host George Stephanopoulos to conduct political interviews in Campaign 2016 without disclosing his status as a Clinton Foundation donor and former top aide to President Clinton.

“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully,” says Facebook vice president Adam Mosseri. “We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst.”

In March 2017, the Google-funded nonprofit First Draft announces “A Field Guide to Fake News,” which includes a category described as “anti-liberal” fake news sites, but none that are “anti-conservative.” Apparently, under the definition used by First Draft and its partners, there aren’t any left-leaning bad actors that are worthy of mention.

So, here’s a timeline of the anti–fake news movement:

September 13, 2016: First Draft announces anti–fake news project.

October 13, 2016: President Obama announces need to curate online information.

November 17, 2016: President Obama condemns fake news as a threat to democracy.

December 4, 2016: Gunman fires shots at fake news Pizzagate restaurant owned by David Brock’s ex-boyfriend.

December 5, 2016: David Brock op-ed calls fake news “an existential threat to our democracy.”

December 6, 2016: Brock announces plan to turn Media Matters into fake news monitor.

December 7, 2016: Brock resigns from CREW to focus more on anti–fake news effort.

December 8, 2016: Hillary Clinton says fake news is putting “lives at risk.”

December 15, 2016: Facebook and Snopes announce initiatives to curb fake news.

January 2017: Brock tells donors that Media Matters helped force Facebook’s hand.

Brock, Clinton, and Obama may be correct about the dangers of fake news and propaganda. But I’m not the only one who thinks the sudden movement to curate news, itself, smacks of a rollout of a propaganda campaign. Investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept writes on December 9, 2016, “The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.” A top national investigative journalist tells me, “The subset of news that is fake is very tiny and inconsequential. . . . The folks so upset about ‘fake news’ are really upset about news they don’t like.”

Of course, just because liberal partisans may have cooked up the anti–fake news movement doesn’t mean there aren’t conservative actors truly guilty of committing fake news. In March 2017, a fake news prototype called the Conservative Daily Post is outed. It had published popular, pro-Trump propaganda during the election under the name and likeness of former beauty queen Laura Hunter, who had hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers. A biography on the site described Hunter as “a well-known blogger and political activist known for her constant stream on Facebook” and claimed she had “been in the reporting and journalism world for almost two decades.” It added that Hunter “is single and enjoys living with her dog in Eastern Tennessee.” According to the Washington Post, Hunter’s name was used to churn out mostly untrue anti-Clinton posts “at a dizzying clip, sometimes twice an hour—bogus stories about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, or Bill Clinton’s involvement in an illicit sex ring.”

It turns out there is a real Laura Hunter—but she didn’t write any of the stories attributed to her. According to the Post, an imposter used Hunter’s name and photo. After the real Laura Hunter discovered what was happening, she sued the alleged perpetrators, claiming they turned her into “a spokesperson for a radical right-wing website that peddles fake news.” Hunter’s attorney added that her personal views are diametrically opposed to those expressed on the conservative fake news site.

For its part, once in office, the Trump team develops its own loose relationship with facts when it comes to the news. In justifying President Trump’s executive order imposing a travel moratorium on seven Muslim-majority nations, his spokesman, Kellyanne Conway, appears on MSNBC and refers to radicalized Muslims being responsible for the “Bowling Green massacre” in the United States. There was no such massacre. The Internet and television news light up with outrage and cries of “fake news.” (Conway later explains that she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists,” referencing two foreigners from Iraq being indicted on terrorism charges in Bowling Green, Kentucky.)

Spotting Fake News

So how can busy people sort through the morass of fake news, efforts that threaten to censor information, and attempts to shape public opinion? Unfortunately, there’s no foolproof method. Author John H. Johnson of Everydata has several suggestions. First, he says, consider the historical accuracy of the media outlets you follow. Second, think carefully about the credentials of those being quoted—are they real experts or simply self-proclaimed experts whose opinions are passed around among online news outlets? Third, he advises, “When you see a story and you’re not sure if it’s true, Google the headline and add the word ‘false.’ If the story isn’t true, you’re likely to get links from Snopes.com and other fact-checking sites explaining why it’s wrong.”

I take issue with the last piece of advice since I wouldn’t trust Snopes as an unbiased fact-checker as far as I could toss a boulder. The idea of making truth police out of parties with political and corporate interests seems doomed at the start. Johnson agrees, to a point.

“I think we have to be careful about relying on others to take responsibility for our own decision making and consumption of news,” he says. He implies that it’s fine to use Snopes to detect blatantly untrue news. “Some things are verifiably false—‘Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump’ or ‘Celebrity X died’ when in fact they are still alive and well,” says Johnson. But he concedes “other types of biases or falsities are more difficult to detect. Bias, misuse of statistics, or reporting incomplete information fall into that category.”

In the end, Johnson concludes the general public should not be seeking a central arbiter of what is true or not. “I think the more important issue is that consumers know to check things—who is authoring the story, what are the underlying affiliations, what are the sources, are they verifiable. Also, I think if consumers can look at news stories and discern if there is even an attempt at balance—are two sides of a story being told? Is a headline sensational?”

In a telephone call, I raise similar questions with Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft, where the anti–fake news movement largely began in 2016. She also acknowledges difficulties in the task of divining ultimate truth.

“I’ve never heard one [social media or news organization] as wanting to have role of curator or arbiter,” Sargent says. “They’re definitely conscious of their responsibility of their algorithm [that selects trending topics] and how it surfaces. Currently, the more popular content is misinformation and false stories. But nuance comes with that. It would never be appropriate for any news organization to position themselves in the role of what’s true and not. These are common challenges everywhere.”

The Wild Card Factor

If Democrats believe they can create and own an anti–fake news campaign and use it to crush Trump, they once again sorely miscalculate. Trump begins flagging incidents of what he views to be fake news in the mainstream media. To an outsider, it almost looks like toddlers slinging peas at one another: as fast as reporters manage to call out Trump for supposedly committing fake news, he hits them back with his own examples of their supposed false reports. Pretty soon, Trump has effectively co-opted the phrase. At a news conference on January 11, 2017, CNN reporter Jim Acosta tries to ask a question and persists when Trump doesn’t call on him. “You are fake news,” Trump declares, pointing a finger at Acosta.

“It’s all fake news. It’s all fake news,” Trump tells reporters at a February 16, 2017, news conference. A week later, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he tells the cheering audience, “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake.”

The wild card.