If you don’t like the news, call it fake
What we can learn from Trump’s shocking attacks on the media
A screenshot of the top of the “media bias” web page that the White House posted on November 28.
For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” —2 Timothy 4:3
Ever since my first post on January 20, I’ve been looking for firmly committed Trump supporters willing to engage with me. (Not just people who support Trump half-heartedly or reluctantly because they think the Democratic party, with its expressed antipathy to aspects of traditional Christian morality, would be worse.) This summer, I finally found one. A longtime friend rediscovered me through this blog and offered to interact.
It didn’t take me long to discover that meaningful dialogue between us was virtually impossible, for one simple reason: we don’t agree on which information sources we can trust. For most people, information reported by mainstream media sources such as the BBC, the New York Times, Reuters, or the Wall Street Journal is assumed to be accurate. Not for Trumpers. Claiming that “the vast majority of the mainstream media bought into and parroted the ‘Trump is a Russian Asset’ hoax,” my friend rejects pretty much everything that comes from standard media outlets.
Here’s one e-mail from my friend: “20 CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] agents have just CONFIRMED Barack Obama personally worked with former CIA Director John Brennan to create the fake ‘Russia Hoax’—and then hid the entire operation inside a classified CIA vault for nearly a decade.” Here is his source; here is a mainstream media story on the same claim. Check both of them and see which one you think is producing fake news.
Perhaps the most dramatic divergence is over what happened in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. My friend sides with Trump’s claim that FBI agents instigated the riot. That’s a pretty fascinating claim, considering that Trump was the president at the time and should have known what the FBI was doing.
I eventually told my friend that the Bible verse he reminded me of was 2 Timothy 4:3 (quoted above), because he has chosen to believe information that aligns with his worldview and to disregard what most of the world considers credible information.
It’s one thing when an average citizen succumbs to alternative reality; it’s quite another thing when the US president—whom European leaders feel obligated to placate because he controls the world’s most potent military—creates an alternative universe of alleged facts.
On November 28, the White House launched a new “media bias” web page that claims to expose the “lies” of mainstream media. Its “leaderboard” of seven top offenders includes the generally conservative Wall Street Journal.
I’ll analyze just one example. According to the White House web page, the media falsely stated that Trump called for the “execution” of six Democratic party members who released a video criticizing him. Well, his social media post accused them of “seditious behavior, punishable by death,” and he reposted another person’s message that said to “hang them.” It’s hard for me to imagine a presidential office defending such actions by saying he didn’t literally call for their execution.
Media bias does exist, for various reasons. Many media sources have an ideological leaning. All stories are colored by the writer’s judgment as to what is important; for example, journalists who are not personally religious often downplay the importance of religion in society. But the Trump administration’s unbridled attacks on media and opposing politicians reinforce my sense that its narrative is more akin to 1984, George Orwell’s famous book on totalitarianism, than to reality.
(You can find a Trump supporter’s response to this post here.)