How a massacre of facts could be Trump’s undoing
A culture of rebuttal coming up from the crowd – which is then magnified by the mainstream media – is doing more than just keeping Trump and his cronies in check, writes Raymond Snoddy
It was like a scene from an old-fashioned black and white film about a lone reporter as hero. Joe Sonka, a staff writer for the Insider Louisville website, was having a beer in a bar called the Backdoor when someone texted him that top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway had just said something “insane” about violent events in Kentucky where he used to work.
Conway had cited “the Bowling Green massacre” on television as justification for the Trump imposed travel ban from seven Muslim countries without being challenged.
Sonka went home to check his memory and found that two Iraqi refugees had been arrested in Bowling Green and accused of plotting to send money and arms to Al Qaeda in Iraq but that was all. They were never charged with any offence in the US although they were almost certainly involved in terrorism in Iraq.
At 9.34pm on Thursday 2 February Sonka wrote on Twitter ‘@KellyannePolls says that 2 Iraqi refugees “were the masterminds behind the Bowling green massacre” (there was no such massacre)”.
The story of honest Joe Sonka is lovingly told by New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg. What happened next is a remarkable and optimistic tale in the battle against fake news – the deliberately invented stuff – and the mere fake news put about by President Trump and his people.
The modest Tweet was retweeted 2.4 million times and then followed up by Vox, The Washington Post, CNN and even Fox News – the Trump channel of choice – and then in the unkindest cut of all onto the television mockery of Saturday Night Live.
Eventually Kellyanne – she of the alternative facts on Inauguration Day crowd numbers – was forced to retract. Sort of. She admitted to having “misspoke one word.” She had meant to say Bowling Green terrorists. Well no, actually a quick look at the record showed Conway had referred to the “Bowling Green massacre” that never was, on a number of previous occasions.
She has been flayed alive on Twitter and lost a lot of her credibility.
For Rutenberg the affair could mark a turning point in the battle against fake news and for the credibility of the mainstream media.
“In the end, social media and journalistic scrutiny aligned with comedy to right a wrong pretty definitively. That it happened so organically showed that false ‘facts’ might not always be the stubborn things so many people fear they are becoming,” Rutenberg argues.
Now we also have to contend with claims that the media are not even reporting terror attacks and were pursuing their own agenda. This week the “not reporting” was downgraded to “under-reporting” by Spicer who provided a list (and of course the incidents had been fully covered around the world.)
This may be the shape of things to come – a bizarre Trump claim which is then moderated by his own staff before being blown out of the water by simply checking the facts.
Is the Bowling Green ‘massacre’ a one off?
Almost certainly not, because the American media – perhaps belatedly in the case of television – has renewed its efforts to check and triple check everything that Trump says and does. It is the difference between covering a “colourful” and ratings driving candidate and the elected President of the United States.
And obviously Twitter is a double-edged sword. Trump lives by Twitter and could yet die and have his credibility undermined by millions of disgruntled citizen Tweeters. There is little that Trump would hate more than becoming a figure of ridiculousness outside the ranks of his most die-hard supporters.
This week the New York Times portrayed a strange isolated world of the Trump White House where some meetings were held in the dark because no-one could find the light switches and where Trump retired to the residential quarters to watch TV in a bathrobe and tweet – and, more importantly, was signing executive orders he had not been involved in framing.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer naturally attacked the article as fake news. He wasn’t even sure that Trump owned a bathrobe but he had certainly never seen him wearing one.
Cue dozens of pictures of Trump in bathrobes on Twitter.
A trivial example perhaps, although the White House may be using attacks on trivial issues to divert attention from far more serious issues such as Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia.
But what we are seeing is a culture of rebuttal coming up from the crowd and then magnified by the mainstream media, and the mainstream media are benefiting mightily from the poisonous attentions of Trump and his cronies.
As our very own Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times noted this week, the attacks by Trump – who usually refers to the title as the Failing Times – were really good for business: several hundred thousand new subscriptions signed up since the new President took power.
Sitting watching TV news in the US at the moment is to enter a parallel Trump universe. Whether it’s CNN or Fox News it’s wall to wall with no other stories making the cut – except briefly for the Super Bowl – and even that was Trump packaged with a long interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News.
It was noticeable that O’Reilly was anything but a Fox News patsy and pushed back firmly on some of the Trump policies, particularly why he respected “a killer ” producing replies which caused outrage by in effect equating US and Russian behaviour.
The vigorous American media response to fake news has served to highlight the importance of the issue which is also being taken up in the UK, France and across the EU.
A Channel 4 survey this week showed only 4 per cent of Britons could correctly identify six true or false stories, with those who used Facebook as their primary source of news being the least able to tell the difference. A surprising 36 per cent thought that a story made up in Macedonia, that the Pope had endorsed Trump, was true.
In France news organisations have got together with Google News Lab and Facebook to run a CrossCheck project aimed at catching falsehoods and the EU has been threatening to take action unless the likes of Facebook and Google take greater responsibility for what appears on their websites.
It looks as if there is political momentum behind the desire to do something about truly fake fake news – i.e. something totally made up possibly for financial gain – momentum that has spread all the way to the Commons Media, Culture and Sport Select Committee.
Dealing with mere fake news where there can be a difference of opinion, or alternative facts in the Conway mode, is a little bit more difficult and ultimately people will believe what they want to.
But the case of Kellyanne Conway’s Bowling Green massacre and Joe Sonka, the reporter who called her out in the Backdoor bar with the help of a million of tweets and the mainstream media, is a hopeful sign of what can be achieved – especially in the all important arena of “genuine” political fake news.