Fraudulent fakes

Now the problem is fake news about fake news.

We need to get straight right quick on our definition of terms. And we need forthwith to become less fraudulent in our output and more discerning in our intake.

Otherwise we're going to wind up unable to agree even on whether I started this column with the word "now."

President Donald Trump is a big part of the problem, but I repeat myself.


Last week our new president called "fake news" the bad news judgment exercised by CNN in airing a report that intelligence officials had given him a dossier suggesting that Russians had compiled compromising information about him.

But that information wasn't "fake." There indeed existed such a dossier.

And, yes, the dossier was included with information that intelligence officials shared with Trump in a meeting about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee--a fact that Trump had been, until then, calling "fake," typically.

The flaw in CNN's report was the absence of full context. It was in CNN's failure to withhold reporting on the dossier unless and until it got credible answers to all relevant questions about context.

Intelligence officials ended up saying they couldn't vouch for the accuracy of anything in the dossier. They said they gave it to Trump on the premise that he deserved to know about its existence. They also thought the document demonstrated well the gossip that intelligence officials must deal with.

The intelligence officials were trying to make the point that, when they say something is accurate, such as that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC, they've locked it down--unlike, well, the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a lot of the garbage they never talk publicly about, such as that little dossier about Moscow prostitutes and supposed Trumpian bodily function activities therewith.

Trump denied the salacious detail--which a website, not CNN, published--by saying he was a "germaphobe."

CNN is a credible mainstream news organization that needed better supervisory personnel in the newsroom that day. Getting beat on the dossier story would have been less a problem than contributing to the president's deliberate and self-serving mischaracterization of fake news.

Real fake news, the newest oxymoron, is of the kind exposed Thursday by the New York Times.

A 23-year-old Davidson College graduate named Cam Harris, working for a Republican state representative in Maryland, got an idea on how to make a few bucks to pay his rent and meet his student-loan payment. He was inspired by Trump's late-campaign speech in Ohio when Trump thought he was going to lose and was alleging a "rigged election" against him.

This Harris fellow went to expireddomains.net and, for $5, purchased the domain name ChristianTimesNewspaper.com.

He thus created a God-fearing religious news organization, don't you see?

Then he wrote and posted on this site a wholly made-up but real-sounding news article labeled "breaking news." He included phrases designed to capture Google searches for "rigged election."

This made-up "breaking news" from the Christian site was that a plumber had wandered into a warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, and found black bins marked "ballot boxes" that contained thousands of bogus ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton for president.

Harris knew he needed a photograph to illustrate this major news. He found a picture from Birmingham--the one in England--of a man standing over an array of black bins marked "ballot boxes." He reported that the man standing there was the plumber.

Within minutes the post had gone viral through Google search referrals and six Facebook accounts Harris had set up. Within hours this site was among the busiest in the world--so active that Google, as was its custom, placed advertising there that netted Harris thousands of dollars in commissions.

The election commission in the county covering Columbus began an investigation, and, in a few days, declared the report bogus.

It was a simple business model: monetize the gullibility of Hillary-haters.

The Times reported that Harris could have sold the site at its height of activity for more than $100,000. But he made a mistake by not deciding to sell it until after the election, by which time the fake-news phenomenon was getting exposed and Google had pulled all the ads, rendering the site worthless.

The day after he was exposed by the Times--in an article for which he blithely sat for an interview--Harris was fired and issuing an apology. He said he hoped to become part of a national discussion about how Americans should proceed in this new era in which the world is seen through entirely different lenses.

Fake ones, that is.

He's probably been a valuable and quite-sufficient part of the discussion already.

The greater problem now is this president using "fake news" in reference to real news he doesn't like.

I can shorten that preceding sentence by putting a period after president.

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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.

Editorial on 01/22/2017

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