Ferguson turned to the New York Times and got more of the same: “One by one, they said their names and—as if working to outdo one another—paid homage to Mr. Trump, describing how honored they were to serve in his administration.” CNN was no better, no different. “Trump planned to have every Cabinet member speak,” wrote the CNN reporter. “And when I say ‘speak’ what I really mean is ‘praise Trump for his accomplishments, his foresight, his just being awesome.’ You think I am exaggerating. I am not.”
Often happy to pile on, Ferguson decided to watch the entire twenty-five-minute introduction rather than just selective clips. Wrote Ferguson afterward, “I discovered that every story I had read or heard or seen that morning about the cabinet meeting was, as a whole, wrong or misleading, and in many particulars, just wrong.”
By Ferguson’s count, eleven of the twenty-three appointees did not mention Trump at all. Almost all who spoke of him did so appropriately. Wrote Ferguson, “The ‘adulation’ was all in the fevered imaginations of reporters.”
Ferguson summed up the fake news phenomenon. “In the eyes of the bright young things who work in the White House press corps, with their faulty educations and unearned world-weariness,” wrote Ferguson, “everything Trump does must be nefarious, and if not nefarious, at least vulgar and unprecedented. It just has to be. So it is. Even when it’s not.”
Attacking Fox
For all their power, the major media could not prevent their citadel from being breached in November 2016. The barbarians had gotten inside the gate. At their head was Donald Trump, the vulgarian-in-chief (from the Latin vulgus, “the people”). To pull Trump down, strategists on the left understood they would have to subvert the media that supported him, both corporate and Samizdat. The corporate part was the most vulnerable.
Immediately, the media sought to undo Trump’s presidency. They were not even subtle about it. From the day Trump was elected, the major media assaulted him and his allies with a ferocity and consistency no other president had ever experienced. In a useful public service, the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard catalogued the abuse. At CNN, NBC, and CBS, more than 90 percent of Trump’s coverage was negative during Trump’s first hundred days, his presumed media “honeymoon.” At the New York Times, that figure was 87 percent and at the Washington Post, 83 percent. At the German consortium ARD, the world’s largest public broadcaster, the coverage of Trump was a frightening 98 percent negative.1 The one outlier in the Shorenstein study was Fox News. Living up to its “fair and balanced” slogan, Fox registered 48 percent positive, about 40 percent too much for the Pravda crowd.
For years, Fox dominated cable news for one obvious reason: it was the only television news channel that respected the views of the conservative half of America. From the beginning of his presidency, Obama made a point of singling out Fox News. It was the one network that challenged him on issues that Fox’s competitors preferred to ignore: Fast and Furious, the IRS targeting of Tea Parties, Obamacare, the Iran deal, even Benghazi. In June 2009, Obama began making his discontent known. “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” Obama complained.2 Although he did not say “Fox” out loud, everyone in Washington got it.
In a 2010 Rolling Stone interview, Obama got down to specifics. Yes, the problem was Fox News. Prompted by publisher Jann Wenner, he described Fox as a throwback to a time before “the golden age of an objective press,” a time when media moguls like William Randolph Hearst used their outlets “very intentionally to promote their viewpoints.” From Obama’s perspective, Fox’s viewpoint was “ultimately destructive.” That said, however, he could not deny that Fox had been “wildly successful.”3
The attack on Fox News went beyond the rhetorical. In 2010, billionaire George Soros gave Media Matters $1 million specifically to target Fox. To Soros, Fox was public enemy number one, and he was not reluctant to say so. “I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”4 (There’s that word “discourse” again.)
Beginning in that same year, Obama’s Department of Justice secretly monitored the personal and professional communications of James Rosen, Fox’s Washington correspondent. What was troubling about the specific case, which involved the monitoring of North Korea’s nuclear program, was the willingness of the DOJ to use search warrants to investigate a reporter. Worse, its attorneys threatened to prosecute Rosen under the terms of the Espionage Act “as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” Said First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin, “Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public. That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”5 No one much listened. Rosen was Fox News after all.
Coming into the 2016 election season, Fox executives, like those at Sinclair, had good reason to feel spooked. As I discussed earlier, they feared the various reprisals that might follow a Hillary Clinton victory, especially given her history of lawlessness and her taste for revenge. Without a major push from Sean Hannity, it is unlikely our “Rigging” videos would ever have aired on Fox. Had Fox blinked, the other networks could have safely ignored our videos, and Scott Foval might still have his job.
When Trump unnerved Washington by winning, Obama, while still president, assigned a major part of the blame to Fox. He found it shocking, appalling really, that Fox News aired “in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.”6 He seemed unaware that conservatives are exposed to liberal media every time they open their Yahoo! or AOL or Google accounts, every time they pass a newspaper rack or a magazine stand, every time they sit in an airport waiting area anywhere in America and are exposed to just one network, CNN.
As long as Fox News remained “wildly successful,” however, Obama and his allies would not be able to monopolize what these citizens saw and heard. No longer able to rely on the DOJ or the FCC to achieve their ends, strategists on the left turned to their friends in the media, and they set out to break Fox News by the surest way possible—subverting its success. “The public has no idea of the extent to which news is influenced by smear merchants,” said former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. “They operate from a Byzantine playbook to exploit today’s weak-kneed and corporate owned media.”7
The first Fox News rainmaker to be taken out was Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly was big enough that the hit had to come from an entity with equal or greater clout, and who more likely to make a clean kill than the New York Times. The headline of an April 1, 2017, article by Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt spoke to both the reason O’Reilly was targeted and to the precise spot of O’Reilly’s greatest vulnerability, “Bill O’Reilly Thrives at Fox News, Even as Harassment Settlements Add Up.”8
The exhaustive article provided various charts and graphs to document O’Reilly’s importance to the company’s success. “His value to the company is enormous,” insisted the reporters. “From 2014 through 2016, the show generated more than $446 million in advertising revenues, according to the research firm Kantar Media.” The Times dug deeper on this story than it had on Fast and Furious or the IRS targeting of the Tea Party. The reporters unearthed five women who accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior, fewer than they had found for Donald Trump but enough to cause headaches for Fox News.
To be sure, Fox News was not eager to dispense with O’Reilly. Its executives had already sacrificed the mastermind behind Fox News, Roger Ailes, on the altar of gender sensitivity, but Ailes was near the end of his career—and his life. O’Reilly still had many productive years in front of him.
Or so he thought. On April 19, Patriot’s Day, the Times thrilled its readers with an article simply titled, “Bill O’Reilly Is Forced Out at Fox News.”9 Schmidt and Steel were pleased to report “that more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show,
and women’s rights groups had called for him to be fired.” They wrote this as though the protests against O’Reilly rose up spontaneously. They did not. Whatever the merits of the case against O’Reilly, the Times and its allies targeted him not for his behavior—he was a choirboy compared to Times heroes Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy—but for his success. Through their popularity, O’Reilly and other Fox stars forced their way into public spaces, specifically those bars and restaurants in “chunks of the country” big enough to unsettle Barack Obama and deny Hillary Clinton the presidency.
With O’Reilly’s scalp on their belt, the activists next went after Sean Hannity. They were helped by an unlikely collaborator, a semi-obscure pundit named Debbie Schlussel, best known for her hardline position against Islam. On Friday, April 21, two days after O’Reilly was fired, Schlussel claimed on an Oklahoma radio show that Hannity had once invited her back to his Detroit hotel room after a book signing.10 In listening to her gossipy ramblings after the fact, I got the impression that she bore a grudge against everything Fox. Whatever Schlussel’s motives, she played right into the hands of the anti-Fox media. By the time Monday rolled around, her accusations, often amplified, were everywhere. Unlike O’Reilly, however, Hannity was not vulnerable along this line of attack. Calling Schlussel’s claim “100 percent false” and threatening to sue, he counterattacked so passionately he backed the media off.11
It was a strategic retreat. A month later, Media Matters took the lead in attacking Hannity for the content of his show. Unlike his peers in the major media, Hannity dared to inquire whether the unsolved shooting death of young DNC staffer Seth Rich on a Washington street might be related to the WikiLeaks investigation. For the major media, the real problem with the WikiLeaks angle was that it conflicted with their equally speculative claim that somehow Trump and Russia colluded to deny Hillary the presidency. When Hannity suggested that Rich may have been involved, he stepped on their narrative. Enter Media Matters stage left. Instead of making an effort to bring Rich’s killer to justice, new Media Matters president Angelo Carusone posted a list of Hannity advertisers. His goal was to pressure them into dropping Hannity’s show.
“I don’t think that it is censorship if a company doesn’t want to associate with or give money to a personality,” said the always disingenuous Carusone.12 He can call it what he wants, but the endgame of Media Matters and its allies was to secure Pravda-like control over all broadcast media, which is why Hannity refused to roll over. “This is an attempt to take me out,” he said of the Media Matters effort. “This is a kill shot.”13 He lost several advertisers but held on.
Despite Trump’s victory, I expect the crackdown to intensify.
As of this writing, the Republicans control Congress and the White House, but their power is an illusion and not much of one. Trump received only 4 percent of the votes in the District of Columbia and 11 percent of the votes in Manhattan. He did only slightly better in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, the money from both sources having gone almost exclusively to Hillary Clinton.
The totalitarians on the left still had their hands on the levers of media power, and now they were angry to boot. They could tweak their algorithms to keep us from trending on their social media sites. They could render critical words as “hate speech” and block discussions on those subjects. They could and did dismiss us as “fake” and assure their own partisans that everything we said or did had been “discredited.” Long trained to ignore alternative sources, the partisans, more often than not, chose to accept uncritically their side’s version of the truth, their Pravda.
This is not paranoia. In May 2016, the largely apolitical tech and science site Gizmodo reported in some depth how “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section.”14 According to Gizmodo, the “news curators” were mostly young and Ivy educated. They not only imposed their own biases on the news, but they also followed instructions from above. They told Gizmodo “they were instructed to artificially ‘inject’ selected stories into the trending news module” regardless of whether there was any grassroots interest in the story.
The crackdown on the alternative media continues apace with that on the corporate media. In July 2016, in pure Samizdat spirit, Google senior engineer James Damore circulated a memo internally describing the company as an “ideological echo chamber” with a “politically correct monoculture,” one that made dissent difficult. Damore quickly found out how difficult. “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves,” said CEO Sundar Pichai in a company-wide memo and then promptly fired Damore.15
Up the coast at Twitter, cofounder and current board member Evan Williams openly regretted what many of his colleagues surely felt. He saw the internet as “broken.” He had believed the free exchange of ideas would make the world “a better place.” Like so many of the self-declared elite, he convinced himself that his idea of a “better place” should be everyone’s. Since it was obviously not, he blamed himself for allowing people the means to “speak freely.” He was especially troubled that Trump would credit Twitter with his victory. “It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” he lamented. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”16 That sorrow, widely shared, will likely translate to harassment throughout the Samizdat, but suppression will not come quickly or easily.
American Pravda
In 2017, progressives of one stripe or another had nearly complete control of academia, public education, the advertising industry, Broadway, Hollywood, the publishing industry, large newspapers and magazines, ESPN, the comedy shows, the TV networks, the major social media sites, and, most troubling of all, the deep state. Exceptions of consequence—Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times—could literally be counted on one hand. The statists functioned not as a monolith the way the Soviet apparatchiks once did but more as a cartel. Their power was not absolute, but it sure as hell was intimidating.
From Berkeley to Boston, all the good people knew what to think about race, about immigration, about gender, about sexual orientation, about Islam, about social justice, about the environment, about the economy, about the climate, and certainly about the president. Although the major media outlets positioned themselves as competitors, they rarely strayed from the party line and almost never challenged each other. When President Obama singled out Fox News, they piled on. When President Trump singled out CNN, they attacked President Trump.
Trump had many enemies of consequence, but none quite as ubiquitous as CNN. “CNN Airport,” for instance, operates in forty-seven major airports across North America, twenty-four hours a day. Viewers cannot change the channel. Airport managers cannot change the channel. CNN plays in virtually every public space that shows the news except deep in the heartland. Perhaps more importantly, CNN owns the world. CNN president Jeff Zucker made this clear by way of a threat the day before Trump’s inauguration. “One of the things I think this administration hasn’t figured out yet is that there’s only one television network that is seen in Beijing, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus—and that’s CNN,” said Zucker defiantly. “The perception of Donald Trump in capitals around the world is shaped, in many ways, by CNN. Continuing to have an adversarial relationship with that network is a mistake.”1
At Project Veritas, our battle from the very beginning has been against the major media. If they had been doing their job, there would have been no need for our brand of journalism. Our synergy with Trump is founded not in shared ideology but in a shared understanding of the way the media work or do not work. The major media’s contempt for what we do is based not on our methods, as they often claim, but on our targets.
When I spoke briefly at the DeploraBall on the eve of the inauguration in January 2017, I made our strategy clear: “Everyone’s saying, ‘Wh
o are you going after next?’ I’m going to tell you right now. I’m going to make it public. I’m going after the media next.”2 The cheers rattled the room. These people did not need Donald Trump to tell them that the major media had made themselves the enemy of the American people.
As I explained briefly to the DeploraBall crowd, we had already launched an initiative that we would come to call “American Pravda.” A critical modifier here is the word “American.” Samizdat media in America such as Project Veritas have protections that Soviet dissidents could not even dream of. We understand that. Post-election, we took advantage of the freedoms we have to infiltrate the major media newsrooms, including CNN’s. If caught, we would only be embarrassed, not executed.
CNN’s Zucker proved as good as his threats. As the Shorenstein study documented, no major media outlet attacked Trump as relentlessly as CNN. In the first hundred days, the traditional media honeymoon, CNN slammed the president in 93 percent of its reports on the presidency.3 These were the domestic numbers. There is no reason to believe CNN treated Trump any more fairly in its broadcasts around the world.
The hostility toward Trump was so pervasive throughout the network that its people began to lose all sense of limits, most conspicuously comedian Kathy Griffin. Griffin, who had cohosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage with Anderson Cooper for the previous decade, had herself photographed with the severed head—happily fake—of Donald Trump in hand. So grotesque was the image that she embarrassed her own side. Once CNN brass realized no one would come to Griffin’s aid, they dumped her.4
After a more protracted deliberation, CNN also felt compelled to sever ties with Reza Aslan, the Iranian-born host of a series called Believer with Reza Aslan. A few days after the Griffin termination, Aslan felt secure enough in the CNN embrace to call President Trump “a piece of shit” and “an embarrassment to mankind” on Twitter. It took a week of social media pressure from the right before CNN dumped Aslan.5 Despite its internal dynamics, CNN positioned itself to the outside world as a middle-of-the-road alternative to MSNBC and Fox News on either extreme. Griffin and Aslan were blowing CNN’s cover.
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