The War On 'Fake News' Is Over. So What's Next In Restoring Media Credibility?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. A little over a month ago I wrote that if we tried to expand the definition of “fake news” beyond for-profit clickfarms, then the movement to eradicate hoaxes from Facebook and other venues would quickly degenerate into ideologically motivated name-calling.

And so it came to pass. The New York Times on Monday published two stories that, for all purposes, mark the end of the nascent battle against fake news.

The first, by Jeremy Peters, details the efforts of Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and other right-wingers to label anything they don’t like that’s reported by the mainstream media as fake news. The second, by David Streitfeld, documents how the right has unleashed its flying monkeys against Snopes.com, the venerable fact-checking site that is the gold standard for exposing online falsehoods.

As the journalist John McQuaid put it on Twitter:

There is a context for what is going on, and that context is the right’s endless crusade against liberal bias in the mainstream media. Charges of such bias may be broadly true when it comes to cultural and social issues, but they fall apart when you examine how the press covers politics. After all, we just elected a racist demagogue as president in large measure because the media were obsessed with his opponent’s emails.

For the right, the very term “fake news” is a gift. It represents the logical end point of what it has been claiming for decades. As David Bell writes in the left-liberal The Nation, merely invoking mainstream outlets such as the Times, The Washington Post, or CNN now brings a sneering retort of “fake news” from the likes of Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Bell correctly points out that the delegitimization of mainstream news is more dangerous than the proliferation of fake news, since the former deprives us of any common fact-based reference points. He writes:

Even entirely blatant corruption, and blatant violations of the Constitution are likely to be dismissed as “fake news” by the conservative media machine. Reports in the mainstream media will be denounced as part of a nefarious plot by liberals to destroy the administration (and, by extension, America), and could well intensify Trump’s support. Criticism by Democrats, and attempts to hold Trump accountable, will be treated as grievous attacks on American democracy, justifying extraordinary—and perhaps extra-constitutional—responses.

Is there a way out? Not in the immediate future. As the Pew Research Center has found, claims that people don’t trust the media obscure the reality that they do trust the media they actually use. And liberals trust mainstream sources such as NPR, PBS, and the Times, whereas conservatives trust blatantly ideological outlets like Fox News, Limbaugh, and Hannity.

One of the most hopeful articles I’ve read was a recent piece by James Fallows in The Atlantic. Fallows found that though the current toxic media environment has indeed poisoned our ability to get along on a national level, things are very different on the ground. Fallows’s message is not especially optimistic—he is as filled with despair as most of us are who’ve taken the full measure of Donald Trump. At the community level, though, that despair gives way to something else. He writes:

According to a Heartland Monitor report in 2016, two in three Americans said that good ideas for dealing with national social and economic challenges were coming from their towns. Fewer than one in three felt that good ideas were coming from national institutions.... [C]ity by city, and at the level of politics where people’s judgments are based on direct observation rather than media-fueled fear, Americans still trust democratic processes and observe long-respected norms.

What Fallows suggests is that if we can find a way to get to know each other, to work with each other, and to get along with each other at the national level in the same way we do at the local level, then a lot of the hostility that pervades our national politics—the hostility that handed the Electoral College to Trump—will start to dissipate.

I don’t know how that’s going to happen. David Bell argues that the mainstream media should fight back. But they can’t, at least not in the same way as the right-wing ideological media do. For all their flaws, the mainstream media stand for the pursuit of truth, verification, and, when they screw up, correcting their errors. If they start shooting from the hip, then they give up their one advantage.

The best we can hope for in 2017 is that the media will subject the Trump administration to tough, fearless coverage—even though they know in advance that their efforts will be labeled by Trump partisans as fake. What else can we do other than to keep at it and hope this moment will pass?