The Manipulators

by Peter J. Hasson

  Social media provided journalists with the ability to reach millions of people they couldn’t reach before, but it gave everyone else that ability too—a democratizing effect that was good for alternative media outlets, but bad for corporate media behemoths used to having an institutional advantage. It was also bad for out-of-touch establishment reporters who feel entitled to Americans’ trust, whether they’ve earned it or not. Social media poses a direct threat to traditional media companies, and many journalists openly resent Facebook and Google because of it.

  They resent not only the loss of advertising revenue, but the loss of power. The 2016 election showed that establishment media journalists no longer controlled the national discussion the way they felt they should. The national media was so uniformly “With Her” that they viewed Clinton’s loss as proof positive that voters must have been misled by other news sources. Social media is the biggest reason why establishment media outlets don’t have the smothering level of influence they once enjoyed, and it took the 2016 election for them to realize it.

  When establishment media companies stoke fears about social media platforms being sources of misinformation, they do so out of self-interest. In the 1930s, newspapers had the same incentives to discredit radio. The most celebrated case was probably the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which included a fictional newsman warning about an alien invasion. Legend has it that across the country, people listening to the broadcast panicked en masse. But that was newspaper spin; it’s not what actually happened.

  “The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast,” Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow wrote in a 2013 Slate article.6

  “How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.”

  Now consider the establishment media’s alarmist treatment of tiny fake news websites.

  Fake News about Fake News

  Two days after the 2016 election, The Guardian published a news article titled, “Facebook’s Failure: Did Fake News and Polarized Politics Get Trump Elected?” The sub-headline: “The company is being accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter the echo chamber that defined this election.” Subtle. The fear-mongering article was shared more than 26,000 times.7 “The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news,” claimed Max Read of New York Magazine.8 A month after Trump’s victory, MSNBC’s Brian Williams confidently informed his viewers that “fake news played a role in the election.” Actual research on the subject, rather than partisan hysteria, shows it was highly, highly, highly unlikely that “fake news” influenced the election.9 The people who share fake news aren’t swing voters: they’re the most diehard supporters of all. They’re the people who want to believe fake news. But if you only get your news from establishment news sources, you probably have a much different picture of fake news’ (non-existent) influence.

  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post cited fake news site DenverGuardian.com in December 2016 as a frightening example of the dangers of an unpoliced Facebook. At the time, DenverGuardian.com wasn’t in the top 91,000 sites ranked by web traffic in the United States, according to web analytics firm Alexa. To put that number in perspective: the site that supposedly helped elect President Trump was more than 84,000 slots behind the website for Northern Virginia Community College. The New York Times devoted front-page coverage to another fake news site called the “Patriot News Agency.” The Times’ story gravely emphasized that “operators of Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected.” But the Patriot News Agency was even less popular than DenverGuardian.com, clocking in all the way down at 184,898 in Alexa’s ranking of websites in the United States. And the site’s Facebook page had barely 100 likes at the time, giving it roughly the same reach on Facebook as your local coffee shop.10 Of course those facts didn’t make it into media coverage.

  In a study published two years later, professors from Princeton and the University of Michigan provided further confirmation that “fake news” was essentially a non-issue in the 2016 and 2018 elections.11 University of Michigan professor Brendan Nyhan, the lead political scientist on the study, noted in February 2019: “it turns out that many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election.” Nyhan added: “there remains no evidence that fake news changed the result of the 2016 election.” Nyhan said the media would be better off focusing on “elite misinformation,” rather than “fake news.” But for the establishment media, the real issue was taking back control of the national discussion.

  When CNN hosts and commentators in the liberal establishment media talk about the 2016 election and “misinformation,” it’s obvious which voters they believe were “misinformed.” They don’t mean Hillary Clinton voters—they mean the voters who think differently than they do. The near universal equivalence in the establishment media between “misinformation” and right-wing voters ignores the fact that there’s plenty of evidence of widespread misinformation on the left. For example, polling has consistently shown that a majority of Democratic voters believe that Russia altered voting totals to give Trump a fraudulent victory, which, given all the evidence and government statements to the contrary, is Alex Jones level fake news.12 And yet, you never hear that fact brought up on CNN, or covered by the Washington Post or the New York Times.

  In April 2018, Business Insider published a story, picked up by many establishment media outlets, including the Washington Post, claiming that Russian “bots” (automated accounts) were rallying around Fox News host Laura Ingraham.13 Bret Schafer, communications director for the bipartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy, told me in April 2018 that most of the reporting on the story was “inherently inaccurate.” And he should know, because the Business Insider story cited the Alliance’s own Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which tracks online misinformation. “Most notably, and this is the most common error, we don’t track bots, or, more specifically, bots are only a small portion of the network that we monitor,” Schafer said. “We’ve tried to make this point clear in all our published reporting, yet most of the third party reporting on the dashboard continues to appear with some variation of the headline ‘Russian bots are pushing X,’ ” he said. In fact, the alleged flood of Russian bot-generated tweets in support of Ingraham oftentimes amounted to no more than a couple dozen tweets.14

  But Russian bot stories are candy for left-wing audiences and useful to establishment media narratives. CNN sent a cameraman and a reporter to the front lawn of an elderly female Trump supporter whose group had been promoted by Russian Internet trolls.15 She had no idea that a Russian group had been involved, but after CNN’s coverage, she received a flood of threats and vicious messages.16 Curiously, the network didn’t give the same treatment to left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who was duped into attending an anti-Trump protest organized by Russians after Trump’s election.17 In fact, not only did CNN not ambush Moore at his house, they didn’t cover the story at all. Neither did CNN cover the fact that an arm of the Women’s March was also duped into promoting Russian propaganda.18

  The establishment media has a narrative—for instance, that Trump voters are misinformed, that Russian bots are rescuing pro-Trump Fo
x News hosts, and that Trump supporters are inherently racist—and sticks to it. That’s one of the reasons why the national media screwed up the Covington Catholic story so catastrophically. They were predisposed to assume that conservative high school students wearing Make America Great Again caps, had to be the bad guys, when in fact they were the victims of harassment. It’s also why left-wing extremists—including violent, far-left Antifa—receive minimal or even sympathetic coverage. On both TV and social media, CNN’s Chris Cuomo claimed that Antifa’s critics were too hard on the group; and in one tweet, Cuomo actually compared Antifa thugs to American soldiers on D-Day (both, he argued, were fighting fascism).19 When a group of Antifa thugs jumped two Marines in Philadelphia in December 2018, however, Cuomo did not comment on the story. The attackers reportedly hurled racial slurs at the Marines, both of whom are Mexican-Americans, while beating them bloody. In Cuomo’s (sort of) defense, he wasn’t alone: CNN’s entire network ignored the Antifa attack. It didn’t fit the establishment media’s narrative about extremists existing solely on the right.

  Facebook took down hundreds of accounts in August after cybersecurity investigators identified Iranian operatives running a covert influence campaign, similar to the one waged by Russian trolls in 2016. Among the investigators’ findings: Iranians trolls were trying to promote Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.20 CNN covered the fact that Facebook took down the Iranian accounts, but its coverage left out the Iranians’ support for Bernie, who has been a vocal supporter of the Obama administration’s much-criticized Iran deal. The story provided a stunning contrast with CNN’s hysterical coverage of Russian trolls.

  Establishment media silence on left-wing misinformation campaigns is the rule—not the exception. In 2018, when North Dakota Democrats ran a misinformation campaign meant to keep hunters from voting,21 CNN didn’t cover it at all. When left-wing billionaire Reid Hoffman funded a misinformation campaign to boost Democrats in the 2017 Alabama special election and the 2018 midterm elections, CNN was uninterested. In the special election, Reid-funded activists staged a self-described “false flag” operation to link Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore to “Russian bots” and created misleading Facebook pages linking Moore to alcohol prohibitionists. Former Obama administration official Mikey Dickerson played a key role in organizing the misinformation operation, which was titled “Project Birmingham.” That all sounds pretty newsworthy, but CNN didn’t devote a second of airtime to the story or publish a single story on its website about it.22 When it emerged that Reid-funded operatives garnered millions of impressions on Facebook during the 2018 midterm elections, CNN again ignored the story because the establishment liberal media narrative insists that misinformation is only a problem on the right. The more the establishment media, and left-wing media, can make “misinformation” and conservatism synonymous, the more they can demand the exclusion of conservative news organizations from Facebook. In July 2018, at a meeting between Facebook and several national media companies, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith decried the fact that half of the outlets represented leaned to the right. HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen echoed Smith, and both singled out the Daily Caller as an outlet that Facebook should have excluded from the meeting. The meeting was supposed to be off-the-record, but details leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which published a story headlined, “Publishing Executives Argue Facebook Is Overly Deferential to Conservatives.”23 Smith’s temper tantrum came less than three months after Zuckerberg had assured him that Facebook would slowly “dial up” the suppression of some outlets while boosting others.24 Facebook’s sin was not giving liberal outlets preferential treatment fast enough.

  BuzzFeed and the HuffPost are openly partisan. The HuffPost, for instance, published a news article—not an opinion column, a news article—that called on Democrats to pack the Supreme Court once they retook political power.25 “It is time for the Democratic Party to stop pretending that the words of men like [former Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy matter as much as their actions. The Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive branch of the U.S. government are instruments of political power. All three are currently being used to advance the ideology and agenda of international fascism,” wrote HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter, presumably with a straight face.26 Buzzfeed, meanwhile, canceled ads from the Republican National Committee, and used data collected on its own users to help create ads to support Democrats.27 A 2016 analysis by the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found BuzzFeed’s coverage of Obama was “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic” to the extent that it was “99 percent uncritical—and borderline creepy.”28

  Concurrent with trying to dismiss conservative news outlets as sources of “misinformation,” the establishment liberalmedia has gone into overdrive in promoting itself as the fact-based, neutral arbiter of truth. “Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run towards a story,” MSNBC host Katy Tur said in a network promotion that was widely mocked. CNN has built a marketing campaign around the slogan, “Facts First.” The Washington Post adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness.” The New York Times created its own tagline for the Trump era: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.” (The obvious implication: truth isn’t so important when liberals win elections.)

  But in fact, the establishment media has dramatically lowered the bar for accuracy, and a staggering number of “bombshells” in the Trump era have turned out to be duds. In January 2017, the Washington Post broke a sensationalist story, informing readers that the Russians had hacked into the United States power grid through a company in Vermont. Except they hadn’t. A piece of malware was found on a single laptop at the company, which wasn’t connected to the power grid. The Post’s reporters didn’t reach out to the power companies before publishing their fear-mongering report. It was just one of those stories that was just too good to check; and besides it allegedly involved Russian hackers.29 In May 2017, CNN reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had wrongly failed to disclose meetings with Russians in his capacity as a senator. Six months later, CNN walked back that report: actually, Sessions hadn’t done anything improper after all.30

  In June 2017, CNN led the media pack with a salacious scoop that former FBI director James Comey in his testimony to Congress would refute Trump’s claim that Comey had told him three separate times that he wasn’t under investigation. But CNN’s exclusive report was inaccurate—instead, Comey confirmed Trump’s claim.31 Later that month, CNN published another explosive scoop: Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for his ties to Russian influence operations. The problem with the story, of course, was that Scaramucci was under no such investigation, or any investigation at all. Three CNN reporters lost their jobs over that botched story.32 In September 2017, NBC News reported that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s notes included the word “donation” near the words “Republican National Committee,”33 stoking speculation that Russians had funneled money to support Trump’s campaign—except that the story was bunk, based on anonymous and apparently misinformed sources.34

  In December 2017, Brian Ross at ABC News had his own bombshell-that-wasn’t when he reported that former Trump adviser Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump ordered him to make contact with the Russians before the 2016 election. Ross’s report shocked the political world and sent stock markets plunging, but there was a flaw in the story—it wasn’t true.35 This misfire bombshell was so egregious that ABC had to suspend Ross for four weeks.

  That same month, Bloomberg dropped its own bombshell: Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “zeroed in” on Trump and had subpoenaed bank records for Trump and members of his family.36 That story, too, was incorrect. Bloomberg later walked back its report, saying instead that somebody in Trump’s circle had had their bank records subpoenaed, which is not exactly a shocking revelation within the context of an FBI investigation. Not to be outdone, CNN flubbed its own December 2017 bombshell. The network
reported that Donald Trump Jr. had seen emails stolen by Russian hackers ten days before WikiLeaks released them—only, it turned out, he hadn’t.37 In January 2019, BuzzFeed reported that Robert Mueller had documents in his possession showing that Trump had directed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about Trump’s desire to build a hotel in Moscow during the 2016 campaign.38 Talking heads on CNN and MSNBC discussed whether Trump would be impeached based on the BuzzFeed report.39 But BuzzFeed got it wrong. Robert Mueller’s office, known among reporters for its consistent silence on stories about the investigation, took the nearly unprecedented step of issuing a public statement slapping down the BuzzFeed report.

  The hoopla surrounding Michael Wolff’s book on the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, provides yet another case study of media hypocrisy. Prominent members of the establishment media readily accepted Wolff’s book when it came out in January 2018, even though Wolff himself undermined the accuracy of his sourcing by conceding in a note at the start of the book that parts of it had a general “looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself.”40 That admission was arguably the most truthful part of Wolff’s book, which was filled with errors and untruths. One gossipy anecdote claimed that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blew off a meeting with President Trump to get a haircut. Dozens of political journalists had heard that rumor well before Wolff’s book came out, including me. I personally ran down that same tip months before and found it didn’t hold up. But Wolff decided to run with it and wrote the rest of his book the same way.