The recent revelations arising from the Durham probe into the origins of the Russiagate scandal have made it clearer than ever that, when the media fought back against Donald Trump’s charge that they had become the purveyors of “fake news,” they did so at the cost of having proved him right.
Not that you would know that, if, for some unfathomable reason, you continue to rely on the media themselves for your information. Though The Washington Post has gone back and corrected some details (and omitted some others) in the hundreds of Russiagate stories it ran between 2017 and 2020, it has apologized for or retracted none of them. Nor has any other mainstream media outlet known to me.
There may be a reason for this, apart from simple embarrassment. In fact, they don’t appear even to be embarrassed by such a serious mistake—which suggests that it wasn’t really a mistake at all but a deliberate deception from the start.
One thing we can know for sure is that the era of unacknowledged fake news in which we live depends on the media’s indulgence of, if not its sharing in, the increasingly popular superstition that mere reality cannot intrude upon the right of everyone—at least of everyone in favor with the media—to his or her own idea of what’s true and what’s not.
The week of Dec. 6 brought another reminder of this indulgence with the trial of Jussie Smollett in Chicago on six counts of disorderly conduct for staging his own kidnapping by MAGA-hatted “Trump supporters” in January 2019.
Almost as soon as it happened, it became clear that the alleged racist attack was fake news and that Smollett had paid Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, two Nigerian brothers with whom he was acquainted, $3,500 to masquerade as the left’s idea of Trump supporters, crying “this is MAGA country” as they allegedly attacked him with bleach, a noose, and homophobic and racist slurs.
The ludicrousness of describing Chicago as “MAGA country” should have been a tip-off if nothing else was, but Chicago’s state’s attorney Kim Foxx declined to prosecute the authors of the imposture, and a special prosecutor had to be brought into the case in order for Smollett to be charged, as now he has been.
Not altogether surprisingly, he is no more embarrassed at being caught out than the media have been by the fake news of Russiagate. Like them, he claims the privilege of being the ultimate arbiter of his own truth by sticking to his story, even under oath on the witness stand, no matter how absurd it may appear to anyone else, or to the law.
As examples of never-corrected fake news in the media continue to multiply, more and more people may be expected to pick and choose from the media smorgasbord only that which they want or need to believe, rather than what’s objectively true, something which they have come to believe is unknowable.
“I believe it’s a Walgreens in California cited it,” she is reported to have said, “but the data didn’t back it up.”
Poor AOC! The data are never going to back up anything she prefers not to believe. The only data that count for her are those that back up her own prejudices.
To its credit, the NY Times’ reporters on the story, Keith Bradsher and Steven Lee Myers, express a degree of skepticism about this, calling it an “improbable claim,” though they go on to write that it may carry weight “in some countries disillusioned by liberal democracy or by American-led criticism ... including in China itself.”
There, I think, they are mistaken, possibly even honestly so. For China is the one place on earth where the government’s claim to be a democracy is least likely to be believed. That’s because the people there have grown so used to being lied to by government and media that they can no longer believe a word they say, if they ever could.
At this rate, it won’t be long before the American people find themselves in the same position—but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.
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