So last week was not a good week for Donald Trump. Much like most weeks for Donald Trump since his election. He fired the head of the FBI, admitted he did so because he was displeased with how that person was handling an investigation into his campaign. He shared top-secret Israeli information with Russia, an action which, while technically legal, was exceedingly stupid (as were his reasons for doing so - he was bragging), and puts the USA’s intelligence-gathering and counter-terrorism capabilities in danger. It came out that Trump had told Russia that Comey was “crazy”, and that firing him took pressure off him.
In short: not a great week. But more importantly, a week full of lots of really important news stories. Any news organization worth their salt would be all over this. Right?
Well, it depends. Is your most trusted news source FOX News? If so, what you heard had very little to do with the actual news stories:
That means the conservative media narrative went something like this:
[ul]
[li]Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for his mishandling of the Clinton investigation and his stubborn insistence on continuing the Russia investigation despite no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.[/li][li] The liberal media drove this narrative to take down Trump, who only wanted the investigation “done properly,” and then started to question Trump’s mental stability.[/li][li] The “deep state” leaked classified info to the Washington Post. Plus, Trump has the right to disclose classified information to Russians, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster agrees.[/li][li] Comey is getting revenge with memos that reveal Trump asked him to shut down the investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.[/li][/ul]
On CNN, Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr was explaining to readers why the Post’s allegations were so grave: By sharing an ally’s classified information with the Russians, “you could put people and assets at risk overseas — that’s the reason you don’t do this,” she said to Wolf Blitzer.
But meanwhile on Fox News, Krauthammer was telling viewers the opposite. He reckoned that, if anything, Trump had made an innocent mistake — a “slip up” — and that America’s compromised ally would quickly forgive the president. “It’s like a three-day story if it’s true,” Krauthammer said. “I don’t think there’s a lot in here. This is the president slipping on a banana peel.”
“We are acting like we’re on the eve of World War III with this story tonight,” added Laura Ingraham. “I think this is part of why people are tuning out.”
Fox News then played an old clip of Trump complaining about Hillary Clinton’s email servers, which contained classified information that could have been obtained by hackers. It was a strange, Rashomon moment. As liberals on Twitter were calling Trump a hypocrite for himself volunteering state secrets to Russia, the Fox News host spoke as if it were self-evident that Clinton had made the graver intelligence error.
And that’s just FOX, which at least tries to maintain a veneer of respectability some of the time. If you look to other news sources, it gets even more absurd, such as Breitbart’s headline, which characterized a story about Donald Trump sharing “code word” intelligence with Russia on a lark as such: “Deep State Leaks Highly Classified Info to Washington Post to Smear President Trump”. Infowars and Hannity openly wondered if all this hubbub about this unimportant Russia witch hunt has to do with the democrats wanting to distract from… an insane conspiracy theory to do with a murdered DNC staffer.
What we have here is a media environment where half the country gets the real news, mostly unfiltered, and the other half gets partisan propaganda, which will carry water for the president under just about any circumstances, downplay any news story, and push a narrative that is not just separate from the “mainstream” media, but also utterly separate from realty. And along the way, they paint a picture of the lying liberal media, that absolutely nobody other than, well, them, can be trusted to cover the media honestly. So you end up with an epistemological closed loop of propaganda, in which republicans only trust FOX News, but FOX News will not tell them about Trump scandals, and FOX tries to negate anything that would lead these people to distrust FOX News.
What the hell do you do about that? This is a serious problem. Democracy doesn’t work with propaganda like this. What can, well, anyone do about this? The government can hardly censure FOX News - the right to lie is definitely covered under the first amendment, even if it’s on national TV. FOX would die without viewers, so you could in theory just educate people out of this, but FOX has done a great job of painting real news sources as “left-wing” and biased, so… good luck with that. It’s turned talking politics with half the country into the equivalent of talking evolution with Young Earth Creationists - your sources are legit, and theirs are bullshit, but there is nothing you can do to convince them that that’s the case.
I dunno. What do you do about this?