Media Matters: 2016 in Review - The Year Fake News Got Real

“Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Edgar Welch is hardly the first DC visitor to pencil a stop at Comet Ping Pong into his Capital City itinerary. Comet is a truly unique establishment. It’s a locally owned neighborhood haunt in the era of global franchises; a place where communal recreation (ping pong) is trumpeted over the isolating amenities touted by many of its competitors (wi-fi). In the age of demographic segmentation, Comet is equally welcoming to students from the numerous neighboring schools eager for an afternoon romp at the tables, families seeking quality time over a couple of gourmet pizzas, or DC’s exponentially multiplying hipsters jonesing to drink craft beer until their skinny jeans burst. One service not offered at Comet Ping Pong, however, is human trafficking. (Any DC native worth their mambo sauce and Rare Essence PA tapes knows that traffic conditions here have been subhuman since the Barry years.) That’s why it was so perplexing that upon his arrest for firing a gun into the floor of the pizzeria, Welch claimed that he had made the five and a half hour drive from his native North Carolina to “self investigate” such an operation being run out of the establishment by former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

On the face of it, the story seems patently ridiculous. How could Clinton possibly have time to prepare all the recipes and complete all the yoga routines detailed in her leaked emails while running an international child smuggling cartel? Micro-manager that she is rumored to be, Clinton would surely have insisted on inspecting every secret tunnel personally. Besides, every Washingtonian knows that the human trafficking arm of the Clinton Foundation is run out of Ledo’s Pizza, because they don’t cut corners. The whole concept seems too absurd to warrant a second thought. That is, if you get your news through a newspaper, television broadcast, or any other venue where trained professional journalists regularly ply their trade. If, like Welch, you belong to the nearly half of Americans for whom social media is the primary source of information, the story may seem a tad more plausible.

The web has always been an informational grab bag, mixing impeccably sourced and reported news stories from the world’s most venerable purveyors of journalism indiscriminately with partisan agenda mongering, inflammatory click bait, and the fanciful fabrications of hormonally haywire adolescents, leaving it to often ill-equipped readers to sift the wheat from the digital chaff. But over the past year, the parade of dubious journalism on the web took a dark turn, seemingly tied to a historically contentious election cycle, as false news items were generated with studied precision and distributed across social media by a vast global network of bots and trolls. 

Here’s how it works. A story is created, generally by a fringe website or a freelancer, often in Eastern Europe, who will be compensated based on views and click backs. Advanced computer programs known as botnets then share selected stories back and forth amongst each other on dummy social media accounts until they are trending on mainstream outlets like Google, Facebook and Twitter. That’s where they pop up into the feeds of your incredulous co-worker, your uncle Earl who always forgets to bring the rolls to Thanksgiving dinner, but always remember the to pack the conspiracy theories, and, presumably, Edgar Welch. Provided the headline is salacious enough and generally re-affirms the existing peculiarities of their particular worldview, they share it with their friends and followers who accept it not as a dubiously sourced crackpot theory from the bowels of the information super off-ramp, but as a groundbreaking exposé shared with them personally by a trusted associate. Shocked and angered, they pass it along to their networks. Within a matter of days, what started as the extravagant concoction of a cash starved Serbian teenager has become a communal truth amongst a sizable pocket of the population.

Variations of the “Pizzagate” story that fueled Welch’s trip to Washington ran rampant around the web in the weeks leading up the the election, fleshed out by laptop Sherlocks who took to wikileaks to comb hacked emails of Clinton and her associates for the proverbial smoking pizza oven. Failing to find actual smoke, and egged on by the rapid fire reinforcement provided from social media, users eventually rubbed their wifi connections together to start a digital fire, convincing themselves and each other of a secret language in which “pizza” was code for child sex trafficking, and the ping-pong paddles at Comet were adorned with pornographic symbols. (Is this the inevitable conclusion for a generation raised on The Goonies and internet porn?) According to a post on Reddit several days prior to the election, “Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.” One mustn’t forget the pizza; it takes the edge off the disembodiment. 

Pizzagate was no anomaly. It was more like a culmination of months of viral offerings in which Clinton was implicated in the murder of an FBI agent, the sale of weapons to ISIS, bribing Khizr Kahn to attack Donald Trump’s positions on Muslims, and countless other atrocities via internet news stories that were at best gross distortions of fact, and in many cases blatantly fabrications. While fake stories about both candidates proliferated in the run up to election day, 17 of the top 20 fake news stories related to the election were determined to have a pro-Trump slant according to BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman. While it would be a gross oversimplification to state that fake news decided the election, it certainly appears to have been a factor in Trump’s unlikely victory. Silverman’s analysis compared Facebook engagement of the top 20 legitimate news stories and the top 20 fake ones, and found that in the final three months of the campaign, the resonance of fake stories surged, while that of their factual counterparts plummeted. By August, the top fake stories were generating more views than the real ones. By November, the differential had sky rocketed to more than 15%. This trend roughly correlates with Trump’s late surge in the polls.

The correlation does not appear to have been lost on Trump and his team. As a result, the 2016 election may well prove to be just the beginning of a massive paradigm shift in the nature of news, media, and even the very concept of truth, driven by the president-elect himself. Less than 48 hours after the election was called in his favor, President-elect Trump took his first foray into the bully pulpit to address a nation deeply divided in the wake of a historically contentious election cycle. Trump eschewed the conventional means through which incoming presidents have traditionally reached out to constituents, choosing not to hold an open press conference or a nationally televised sit-down with a trusted news outlet. Either venue would have provided an opportunity for a substantive dialogue about the country’s exploding tensions, as well as for Trump to reassure an angry and frightened public that, as president, he would leave the incendiary rhetoric of the campaign behind and make every effort to govern in a unifying manor. Instead, Trump reached no further than the pulpit in his pocket from which to commence his bullying, defiantly taking to Twitter to excoriate his critics in a heavy handed 140-character blast.

“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” the first major party presidential nominee of the modern era not to release tax returns proclaimed. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

The only part of Trump’s Tweet that stands as categorically true is that we just had an election.To be clear, there is no evidence that any significant number of the thousands of demonstrators who took to city streets across the nation in the wake of Trump’s electoral college victory were paid or otherwise enticed to take part in the largely spontaneous rallies. Likewise, no mass market media outlets explicitly encouraged civil disobedience. The claims don’t even stand up to internal logic. If the protesters were professionals, i.e. paid, why would they need to be incited by the media? Further, the repeated and often mysterious leaks of classified information made the mechanisms driving this election arguably less “open” than any since the Nixon era.

The Tweet was swiftly derided by all but the most ardent Trump sycophants, and the President-elect himself eventually walked it back, Tweeting the following day that the protesters had “great passion for our country.” But, the original outburst may very well have telegraphed the overarching communications strategy of the incoming administration, in which alternative and digital media are leveraged to sell an agenda through proclamation rather than dialogue, and publicity stunts serve as proxy for actual policy.

Had Trump made his claims about paid protesters in a press conference or interview, he almost certainly would have been challenged in real time - pressed for specifics on his sources, and for names of media outlets that had called for civil disobedience. He would had to have either backed off the claims in in the moment, not a day later, or doubled down with further falsehoods, likely even more easily debunked. By debuting his claim on Twitter, Trump instantly placed it into the very social media echo chamber that, given a few weeks time, had countless seemingly rational Americans believing, like Edgar Welch, that a former secretary of state and First Lady was spending her off hours as the madam of a bondage den beneath the Ping Pong room at Comet. Though Trump’s assertions had been fact checked and dismissed by most reputable news outlets within 24 hours, they had also made their way, unchecked, to the millions of Americans who get their news exclusively through Tweets, Facebook walls and sub-Reddits. 

In the nearly two months since the election, Trump has still yet to hold a formal press conference. He has, however, unfurled falsehoods at a torrid pace, mostly via social media posts and campaign style rallies that are unprecedented in the wake of a decided election. Trump’s juiciest whoppers include claims to have saved 1100 jobs at Carrier with a strong arm phone call to the CEO, and his “cancellation” via Twitter of the federal government’s order to Boeing for a 4 billion dollar aircraft to replace the current presidential plane, Air Force One.

In actuality, Trump’s phone call had no impact on Carrier’s decision to defer outsourcing of half of the 2200 manufacturing positions that had been slated for relocation to Mexico. The industrial systems corporation's sudden outpouring of patriotism was motivated by the $7 million in tax breaks and subsidies offered by outgoing Indiana Governor and Trump Vice President-elect Mike Pence. While it does explain why Pence chose to retain his seat as governor even while ostensibly leading Trump’s transition team, the deal is precisely the type of crony capitalism that Trump decried during the election. Moreover, according to United Steelworkers president Chuck Jones, the deal actually only keeps 730 jobs stateside. So Trump and Pence essentially stuck Indiana taxpayers with a $7 million dollar tab in exchange for losing 1500 jobs. The cherry on top? The deal also calls for a $16 million investment in Carrier’s Indiana plant, much of which will go towards the implementation of automation processes that will eventually eliminate many of the “saved” jobs. Apparently American jobs are like American beer: you don’t really buy them, you just rent them. For a self-proclaimed master negotiator, The Donald certainly appears to have gotten rolled by Carrier. Safe to say, if the Carrier negotiation had been a task on The Apprentice, Trump and Pence would both have been fired.

In the case of Boeing, Trump seemingly broadsided the aircraft manufacturer with a Tweet stating, “Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” In actuality the project calls for two planes, not one, that will cost a total of $2.87 billion over two fiscal years. The contract also includes operations and maintenance of the aircrafts. Moreover, it is unclear whether Trump even has the power to simply terminate an existing government contract. Veracity aside, the narratives Trump blasted out on Carrier and Boeing present the President-elect as a champion of the people, unafraid to take on crooked corporations and bloated government expenditures alike. Moreover, the very fact that the press covers them, as they are obligated to cover any major presidential announcement - even if accompanied by stinging rebuttals and fact checks - imbues them at least an aura of legitimacy equal to that of the corrections. It is as if viewers and readers are receiving two opposing sides of an argument rather than the rebuke of lies with facts.

Perhaps even more disturbing are the early signs that Trump intends to exploit the vast reach of the presidency combined with current chaos amid the digital landscape to systematically discredit his political adversaries and media critics. As Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead continued to swell (currently at around 2.8 million) with the delayed counting of votes in Democratic strong holds California, New York and Washington, Trump took to Twitter unprompted to proclaim, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The claim is jaw-droppingly absurd, even by Trump’s standards. A Carnegie-Knight study found only 10 confirmed cases of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2012. However, for followers steeped in a particular brand of social media driven conspiracy chatter, the President-elect was simply putting the presidential seal on already well traveled terrain. The groundwork was laid in 2014 with the release of a report claiming that a sizable percentage of votes cast in the 2008 and and 2012 presidential election elections came from from illegal immigrants. Despite being quickly and repeatedly debunked, with researchers demonstrating that the rate of “non-citizen voting in the United States is likely zero,” the study continued to be cited in far right corner of the internet, and eventually by the Trump presidential campaign at rallies and media events. By October, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that 73% of Republicans believed that the election could be stolen. In that context, would it really be inconceivable for Trump to have eventually won the election despite massive voter fraud? Following Trump’s Tweet, media outlets left and right, large and small, promptly repeated the assertion. While most of the reports came in the form of challenging or rejecting the claim, they nonetheless matriculated the fake news into the national conversation right along side the proven facts.

Likewise, in light of CIA reports concluding that Russia tampered with the election in a concerted effort to tilt it towards Trump, the President-elect took to Fox News to coyly obfuscate. “Personally, it could be Russia. I don’t really think it is,” Trump dithered. “But who knows? They don’t know and I don’t know.” It’s a refrain similar to the one Trump repeated throughout Barack Obama’s presidency regarding early generation fake news stories that the President was born outside of the United States. Trump stops short of openly embracing a factually dubious claim, while aggressively imbuing it with equal veracity to that of the competing fact-based narratives.

Given Trump’s sophomoric antics, it is tempting to dismiss the benefits he has reaped from the fake news cycle as happenstance; Trump and his itchy Twitter finger oafishly bumbling into proclamations so colorfully audacious that they soar in the viral zeitgeist of a social media sphere that draws its life force from aggression and bombast. Indeed, Trump’s mastery of 21st Century media may have started as a lack of impulse control and a persistent case of insomnia triggered by self-bronzer and hair spray fumes. But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. Trump’s handlers (puppet masters?) found a way to convert proclivity into strategy.

Indeed, the shaping principle behind the Trump campaign and seemingly the impending Trump presidency is now taking shape as the dismantling of truth itself, not just as a practice, but as a concept. In a recent appearance on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” that was as every bit as instructive as it was surreal, Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes tipped the incoming administration’s strategic hand. When pressed about Trump’s debunked claims of mass voter fraud Hughes deftly turned populist philosopher, theorizing:

 “I think it’s also an idea of an opinion… On one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But, on the other half, there are many people that go, ‘No, it’s true.’ And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts - they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way - it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, as facts anymore.”

In other words, Hughes would have us believe gut feeling holds equal footing with hard data. Opinion carries just as much inherent truth as science. The decades of intensive and sophisticated research proving the adverse effects of global warming are to be considered, sure. But, the fact that you were stuck babysitting your kids through a full week of snow days last winter provides an equally compelling counter argument. It’s the logic by which a Florida jury could acquit George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed child, because to Zimmerman’s eye, Martin looked like he was “up to no good.” Or by which as recently as August, 41% of Republicans could still disbelieve that President Obama was born in the United States.

A recent PPP poll found that, in many respects, Trump voters already exist in an alternate reality. Per the poll, two thirds of Trump voters believe that unemployment increased under President Obama. Nearly 40% believe that the stock market went down during his administration. In actuality, the stock market has seen explosive growth under Obama, rising 11, 666 points. Unemployment has steadily declined from 7.8% to 4.6%, the lowest figure in nearly a decade. Such data does not represent two sides of a story or competing interpretations. It represents the clear juxtaposition of perception and reality; empirical data vs. gut feeling. By elevating perception, no matter how baseless, to equal footing as fact, Trump and his team are validating ignorance. What incentive do we have to actively pursue information and insights that may challenge the biases instilled by our immediate environment (we all have them), if we are told by leaders that we’re fine just the way we are - in fact, more than fine. The first thought that pops into our minds, the first feeling that flits through our stomach is every bit as valid as the findings of the most sophisticated analytical tools in the world.

It’s a rabbit hole down which Dr. Ben Carson - a fine surgeon, who quite understandably devoted his academic and professional life to the study of medicine at the exclusion of in-depth engagement with the latest theories and practices in sociology and city planning - can be positioned by Trump as a perfectly reasonable choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, because Carson has claimed to have grown up in public housing. Or former Texas Governor Rick Perry, a climate change denier who flunked organic chemistry at Texas A&M, can be presented as equally qualified for his newly announced role as Trump’s Secretary of Energy as Obama’s picks for the role; a Nobel Prize winner for physics, and the former head of the physics department at MIT.

In a world where facts are fluid and no source of information can be trusted, we are left to follow our guts rather than our heads. While the head processes logic and reason, the gut runs on the visceral. A snarling harangue promising a border wall will cause the gut to churn far faster than a reasoned discussion on the implementation of comprehensive immigration reform. Vitriolic calls for a Muslim ban will fire it up to temperatures unattainable by a research driven position paper on the cultural and economic conditions contributing to the growth of radical religious hate groups. Hysterical chants of “lock her up” can do more to incriminate a political opponent in the guts of a voter base than any amount of legalese, read in monotone by bureaucrats, clearing her of any wrong doing can do do exonerate her.

So what can be done to mitigate the effects of the fake news phenomenon in 2017 and beyond? Already digital media giants Facebook and Google have issued public mea culpas for their unwitting roles in the dissemination of false stories this election cycle, and are already working on algorithms to better prevent such content from trending on their platforms. Similarly, it is safe to assume that the Clinton campaign will be the last major party enterprise to be caught flat-footed by this particular brand of propaganda. Both major parties are likely already crafting strategies to combat such deluges in future elections. Still, once Pandora’s box is opened, it generally takes a lot more than coding acumen and strategy papers to reseal it. Fake news is here to stay, and as we leave the digital chaos of 2016 behind, it will likely take a concerted effort to reign in the informational gun slingers of the wild wild web.

The traditional media, the “failing” newspapers and “low-ratings” garnering broadcast journalists will need to resist the temptation to try to stave off new media by co-opting its quick hitting, report first/ask question later ethos. The legacy press is never going to top social media and digital muckrakers in speed, provocativeness or bombast. But it does run the very real risk of losing itself in the quest to; of diving head first into Trump’s trap of devaluing all news and reporting into a Halloween bag of informational children’s snacks loaded with processed sugar for an instant buzz, artificial color for an alluring hue, and just enough caramel and nougat to make it sticky. Sure, the bag’s net nutritional value will occasionally be bolstered by the odd apple or carrot stick. But, like with Halloween, as news coverage becomes increasingly associated with sweet treats, the greater the regularity with which the rare nutritious morsels will simply get pushed to the side by sugar hungry scavengers.

An aging prize fighter, slowed by injury and weakened by wear can’t expect to out brawl a young bruiser. He must prevail with patience, and a technician’s adherence to the carefully refined craft that earned him his belts in the first place. For the legitimate press, that means doubling down on the core tenets of journalism, defined by the Ethical Journalism Network as Truth and Accuracy, Independence, Fairness and Impartiality, Humanity, and Accountability. If that means devoting additional time to assure that a story is fully sourced and vetted rather than simply rushing to print to scoop the digital competition, so be it it. If it means holding back a salacious item for lack of suitable confirmation, then scrap it - lost clicks be damned. If it means drawing the ire, social media taunts, and attempted legal retribution from the highest office in the land, take a long look at the All the President’s Men poster that I like to imaging adorns every newsroom, and buckle up your big boy boots to fight the good fight. 

Will an aggressive and visible recommitment to journalism suddenly sway the Edgar Welches of the world to re-prioritize fact over feeling, and subject their Facebook headlines to greater scrutiny? Doubtful. The Trump voters who believe that president Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim, and that Hillary Clinton is a purveyor of pizza and prostitution - the alt-righters, white nationalists, religious zealots and rabid conspiracy theorists - will, for the most part, continue to exist in their own digital ecosystem grown and perpetuated out of fear, rage and willful ignorance. But there is also a subset of Trump voters who cast their ballots not out of hatred or prejudice, but out of confusion and frustration at what simply appeared to be an impenetrably bound ball of government corruption and media complicity where the lies, corruption, and cronyism were simply too intertwined to be untangled, or even deciphered. In exasperation, they voted for the tough talking outsider in a desperate hope that Agent Orange would simply wipe out the entire contaminated crop. For that group, a diligent and concerted effort to raise both the scope and visibility of legitimate journalism might, over time, present an increasingly clear contrast between reporting and click baiting; intellectual edification and emotional manipulation. Perhaps most importantly, it will provide a clear and present check on the power of the executive branch that a Republican led congress, and in time, Supreme Court may well fail to offer.

Still, the the press can’t trump The Donald’s fake news offensive by it self. The greatest disservice the internet has done for information consumption is not providing a conduit for fake news, but making “we the people” become passive in how we consume information. Every site that we frequent tracks our preferences, whether we want them to or not. In no time, our timelines, feeds and home pages are populated with stories that match our established tastes, often to the near complete exclusion of opposing view points or previously unexplored subject areas. The web, in other words, defines our comfort zone and then keeps us there.

Thomas Jefferson famously advised that “the cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.” Education doesn’t simply consist of consuming information that is presented, it involves proactively seeking accurate and thorough content positioned along any and all points of the ideological spectrum, especially those which challenge our assumptions and pull us out of our comfort zones. For those of us who lean more towards liberal and progressive views, it means giving an honest hearing to more conservative publications and scholars. For we champions of traditional media, perhaps paradoxically, it means diving deep enough into the cesspool of fake news to at least understand the ideas and ideologies that are driving those who baffled us so with their fervent and seemingly counter intuitive support of Trump and Trumpism this election season.

Business is booming at Comet Ping Pong this holiday season, despite Edgar Welch bringing the ugly and corrosive culmination of 2016’s fake news outbreak literally to, and through, its front door. Staff members are still a bit on edge, as are some regular customers. But ultimately, pizza, beer and table games persevered over anger, fear, and hatred. Pizza, beer and table games. Perhaps that’s where the greater truth actually lies - in the little things; the lighthearted ping pong match with an old college friend, or slice of Comet’s famous Steel Wills on an awkward first date. It all continues on at Comet, and in neighborhood pizzerias, pool halls and dive bars across the country, in spite of the fake news tsunami, the fractious election, and the impending authoritarianism of a Donald Trump presidency. As we usher in 2017, let’s all take stock of those facts as the resounding affirmation of truth that just might keep us afloat as we learn to navigate the rocky waters of the post-truth era.

Media Matters is an exploration of the news of the day, and what it can teach us about communications, contemporary culture, and life in the digital age.

About the Author

Jeffrey Harvey is a Washington, DC based writer and content strategist with experience in broadcasting, strategic communications, public relations, marketing and media analysis. He has written prolifically on subjects including technology, healthcare and arts and entertainment. His original one act play, Coffee won a staged reading at the Kennedy Center in the Source Theater Festival.