COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Fakery on the frontier

The preposterous second-place president-elect, Donald Trump, huffily refused to accept a news-conference question last week from the reporter for CNN, which Trump called “fake news.”

As usual in the case of this preposterous second-place president-elect, a little fair context becomes necessary.

“Fake news” and bad editorial judgment by a legitimate news organization — those are entirely different things. Trump erred — purposely, perhaps — by blending them to smear CNN.

Trump’s obvious madness sometimes has a devious method. Attacking CNN’s credibility might move a few more viewers to Fox News, where his presidency gets reported with a favorable partisan slant.

Let’s try to define a few terms and concepts.

Fake news is making something up for partisan or sinister purposes and using the freewheeling nature of the Internet to get unsophisticated people to read, fall for and spread what you’ve made up.

That’s different from the activity of a partisan Internet outlet that doesn’t so much make things up as it spins fact and truth its way for partisan advantage.

And it’s different from partisan analysis, commentary and opinion in the mainstream press, meaning a column like this one that invites you to think open-mindedly.

By any reckoning, “fake news” is not remotely what CNN did, or ever does, and a defense of the network is therefore called for.

Ironically — and there always will be irony — CNN is the least fake of the three major cable all-news networks.

When a Fox anchor reports that Hillary Clinton’s indictment is imminent, as one did in October, the journalistic disgrace is less bad judgment than partisan right-wing bias. It’s not so much fake news, meaning wholly made-up, as hoped-for news, which is reporting what one was angling to hear from preferred and self-fulfilling sources.

Meanwhile, when Rachel Maddow gives an over-long dramatic narrative and diatribe about a horrid right-wing conspiracy, the context is not fake news. It is that she is a known left-wing commentator on a liberal-inclined outlet, MSNBC, that doesn’t carefully separate its talking heads who are opinionizers from those who are news-readers.

CNN is the granddaddy of cable news, long a valuable source for instant and international news. It’s down-the-middle, or at least somewhere objectively between Fox and MSNBC. Its modus operandi is to balance panels of commentators by partisanship and philosophy so that no truth or wisdom gets imparted, but plenty of diametrically opposing and pointless talking points do.

CNN’s specific sin that Trump was exploiting was showing poor editorial judgment in airing a report about which it should have been more circumspect.

That happens every day, more than it should, in the generally responsible and mainstream media, in part because of competitive economic pressures and the anything-goes frontier of the Internet.

When I was a newsroom cub for the Arkansas Gazette in the pre-Internet, pre-newspaper war days of the late 1970s, they left me alone in charge of the state desk on Saturdays. My editors’ prevailing instruction was that my job was more about keeping unworthy information out of the paper than putting anything in it.

The time-honored thinking was that missing a story was not a fatal error because you could catch up the next day, but an inaccurate and unfair story was not easily taken back.

That is a virtue largely lost in this brave new media frontier. Circumspection and good news judgment will now lose you viewers and clicks, since irresponsibility and bad news judgment are instantly available universally.

To report, as CNN did, that intelligence officials had given Trump a dossier suggesting he had been compromised by Russians because of recorded bad behavior in Moscow … well, that was light years a lesser transgression than that of the online site called Buzzfeed, which, seeking clicks, published verbatim the salaciously detailed dossier itself.

The advantage of hindsight reveals that CNN was irresponsibly incendiary in calling attention even to the existence of an epically titillating report about which it knew too little.

The dossier had not been verified, and perhaps was utterly concocted. Intelligence officials would end up explaining that it provided the document to Trump as a mere example of the kinds of things that get said in the international gossip arena.

Mainstream news outlets in Washington including CNN had been sitting on copies for months, unable to confirm the wild details. So it seems that circumspect editing and news judgment still exist. CNN just lost its way in this case.

From that Trump was able per usual to deflect real issues — such as the help his campaign effectively got from Russians and his seeming admiration for Russia generally — by parlaying CNN’s single case of bad editorial judgment into fake outrage and a tactical smear.

Now his looming White House staff is talking about moving the press off the executive premises to a space providing more room for right-wing talk-show hosts and conservative bloggers.

That’s defensible only if the mainstream media makes enough errors of judgment under pressure to render itself professionally indistinguishable from right-wing talk-show hosts and conservative bloggers.

Thus the dangers of a madman president and a wild media frontier are these:

• A digital proliferation of bogus news sources spreading widely believed lies.

• A concurrent proliferation of partisan news outlets spreading self-aggrandizing spin.

• A man-child president who makes a habit of using social media to say incendiary and absurd things, perhaps to deflect from other issues.

• A consuming public that doesn’t recognize all of that for what it is.

Fixing all of that won’t be easy. The Internet will remain wild and free. Partisans will continue to exploit. Mainstream media will continue to wring its hands and make mistakes.

That leaves only two possible variables, or hopes.

One is that legitimate mainstream news organizations like CNN would defy contemporary pressures, become more circumspect and make fewer errors of judgment.

The other is that the consuming public would become more discerning.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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