Donald Trump was not the first person to coin the iconic and well used term “fake news”. It was actually his opponent in the 2016 election Hillary Clinton who first uttered the term a mere month after her defeat. Two days later Trump used the term and hasn’t stopped using it ever since. How accurate is his appellation? In this 4-part series I am going to examine a number of important issues where the mainstream media (MSM) straight up got it wrong. One of Trump’s repeated contentions is that the “fake news” knowingly publish falsehoods for the sake of the agenda of the progressive left and their political leaders, in the case of the US, the Democrat Party. For decades anyone that is not thoroughly and deeply partisan knew that the MSM exhibits a left leaning bias. Much of this bias can be put down to the inherent ideological leanings of prominent journalism schools and the reporters, editors and most of the opinion writers of MSM outlets. Rather than it initially being an overt conspiracy to favour politicians and narratives from the left over those of conservatives, more it was a ubiquitous group think that was personified in the famous quote from a Manhattan, NY based 60 Minutes producer at CBS News who was shocked by Richard Nixon’s 1972 49 states to 1 landslide re-election victory over Democrat George McGovern by saying that she didn’t know a single person that voted for Nixon!
As I examine these issues, I think it is clear that we have come to a point where the MSM have gone beyond mere bias and have now strayed into blatant narrative shaping and control designed to more directly influence public opinion than ever before. The other episodes will cover:
2 – The Hunter Biden laptop
3 – Russia Collusion
4 – Covid lab leak origin
In this first episode I will examine six issues that received widespread MSM coverage where, in every case, the media peddled what came to be proven to be hoaxes.
1 – Justice Brett Kavanaugh Rape Hoaxes
In early September 2018 the US Senate hearings held to confirm President Trump’s nominated replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (Brett Kavanaugh) became ground zero for the progressive pro-abortion left as they pulled out all the stops to block his nomination. No fewer than four women came forward to make accusations of rape or sexual assault, the most prominent of which was Christine Blazey-Ford.
The MSM uncritically believed Ford’s version of events as evidenced by these articles in the LA Times, Washington Post and left leaning Vanity Fair magazine. Ford tried to avoid testifying before the Senate Judicial Committee where her claims could be questioned by claiming she had a paralyzing fear of flying until it was revealed that she’d lived in Hawaii (accessible overwhelmingly only by air), had holidayed in Tahiti and other Pacific destinations and had regularly flown from the west coast where she lived to visit family on the east coast. Over time her narrative as to how Kavanaugh came to assault her fell apart due to no corroborating witnesses (a named friend and witness said she never knew Kavanaugh and had no recollection of the party) and inconsistencies in her recollection of date and place of the teenage party alleged to have been the scene of the ‘assault’, multiple details as to events in her life such as her marriage breakup, her second front door installed due to her fear of assault and her trauma counselling, most of these ‘facts’ fell apart as did any credibility of her claims against Kavanaugh.
As the hearings wore on, the claims became wilder and more specious. Deborah Ramirz alleged sexual assault at a college party, but The New Yorker magazine (a left leaning icon) interviewed a number of her college acquaintances who had no recollection of the event she claimed happened. Publicity hungry New York attorney Michael Avennetti claimed his client Julie Swetnick had been raped multiple times at multiple parties by Kavanaugh and others. The Wall Street Journal contacted dozens of her former classmates and not one could corroborate the allegations and Switnick herself went on to claim that her lawyer twisted her words. Finally, the most farcical claim came from Judy Munro-Leighton via then Senator Kamala Harris’ office, who alleged in a letter that Kavanaugh raped her. When questioned by committee staffers, Munro-Leighton admitted to fabricating the story to “get attention”.
A raft of prominent national Democrat politicians constantly intoned, “we must believe the woman” and the MSM breathlessly reported every twist and turn of these allegations as if they were true and became part of a drum beat of calls for Trump to withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination. Avanetti appeared on news shows so many times opining on Kavanaugh’s guilt and Trump’s perfidy in nominating him that he was farcically touted as Presidential material ….. until he was convicted of multiple counts of fraud and extortion of footwear company Nike. The narrative of a woman-hating anti-abortion rapist like Kavanaugh was so compelling to progressive media types that no lies or fabricated stories that could possibly derail the nomination of a reliable conservative to replace a wishy-washy RINO like Justice Kennedy could be ignored and so they went all in on the Kavanaugh rape hoaxes.
2 – Covington Kids racism hoax
On January 18, 2019 students from a Catholic prep high school from Covington, Kentucky were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC at the annual pro-life March for Life rally and footage appeared on Twitter showing a Native American cultural protestor called Nathan Phillips advancing to the group of white conservative school boys and the camera focused on 16 year old Nicholas Sandman wearing a Trump MAGA hat appearing to be disrespectful even mocking to the seemingly harmless cultural drumming of Phillips and how Phillips, who claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, said he felt threatened by this mob of judgmental Catholic conservative white kids. The MSM went into a frenzy of accusations of racism and went on to decry the culture of racism and disrespect inherent with Trump’s supporters and the whole MAGA movement. Here is a sample: Detroit Free Press, Daily Beast, and NPR (National Public Radio).
There was massive and swift condemnation of Sandman across social media and left leaning media types dug into anything controversial at the Catholic school in Kentucky magnifying fairly normal but foolish high school pranks into a narrative of conservative Catholic racism and bigotry.
As time went by, the truth began to emerge particularly as the full video footage of the incident emerged not the highly edited versions that were at the centre of the MSM frenzy. The Covington students were minding their own business and it was Phillips who came deliberately over to them, and it was Phillips who came up the steps and drummed right in the face of Nicholas Sandman who tried his best to remain calm despite this unusual provocation. His smile was not of mocking Native American culture but of a teenage boy nervous to not do anything to inflame the situation.
It turned out that Phillips was never a veteran of the Vietnam war and had had a history of involvement in ideological and racially charged protests and of exaggerating his time in the Marine Corps. It also turns out that the Covington kids were not jeering at Phillips but reacting to the loud and aggressive provocations of an adjacent group calling themselves the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Once again, the MSM fell for a hoax that presented a narrative too delicious for left leaning reporters and editors to ignore, that of MAGA supporting privileged Catholic white kids from red neck Kentucky engaging in racist mocking of a poor hapless Indian Vietnam vet. Whilst some MSM outlets did walk back their claims once the full footage began to circulate, the damage to particularly Sandman’s reputation was such that he sued various MSM outlets for defamation and won settlements to date from CNN and the Washington Post, whilst never disclosed, said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. In this instance, the MSM’s rush to believe any anti-right wing, anti-religious, anti-Trump narrative has cost them (and their liability insurers) dearly.
3 – Jesse Smollett’s hate crime hoax
In January 2019 gay black actor and star of the “Empire” series Jesse Smollett contacted Chicago Police and claimed that he was attacked on the street by two white ‘Trump supporters’ who hurled racist and homophobic epithets and placed a rope noose around his neck to threaten him and allegedly said “this is MAGA country”. The MSM duly reported Smollett’s claims of a hate crime uncritically such as CNN and USA Today.
These reports predictably provoked a firestorm of sympathy from media and prominent black politicians and leaders who called it a modern-day lynching and all attacked Trump and his supporters as being perpetrators or tacit encouragers of such a heinous racist crime. However, CPD examination of the CCTV footage showed the alleged attack to be staged with the assistance of two Nigerian brothers who were fitness consultants and gym acquaintances of Smollett’s. When the home of the brothers was raided by police, they found the fake noose and other props. The next month Smollett was charged with five felony counts of disorderly conduct, paying the brothers to fake the crime and for misleading police. A year later he was found guilty at trial and served 150 days in the Cook County jail, and he was also successfully sued civilly by the City of Chicago for $130,000 for wasting the CPD’s time.
Once again, the prospect of white racist homophobic seeming Trump supporters (rare in that part of Chicago) harassing a gay black man was too good a story for the Trump hating predominantly liberal leaning press and social media luminaries to pass up. Given the speed at which the hoax unraveled, many of the high-profile politicians who voiced disgust at the seeming racist attacked backed off their support of Smollett, but the fact remains, large swaths of the MSM were happy to label Trump and his supporters as being the inspiration behind a fake hate crime and once again, they fell for the hoax hook line and sinker.
4 – NASCAR Noose Hoax
In June 2020, black NASCAR driver ‘Bubba’ Wallace said that the FBI were investigating a possible hate crime when he claimed a rope noose was found attached to the pull cord of his garage at the SuperSpeedway at Talladega, Alabama. This provoked the usual howls of Deep South racism from Hollywood and media elites across social media. Wallace himself stoked the inference that this was a racially motivated act of malice on ABC’s “The View”, a favourite show of liberal housewives, and denied it was a hoax. The local FBI office investigated and stated that the so-called noose was actually a, “garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose” and that it had been there since 2019. Despite the findings, Wallace continued to insist that it was a noose but eventually acknowledged the reality as investigated by law enforcement that he wasn’t a victim of a hate crime.
The MSM all faithfully reported the incident with Wallace’s racially motivated hate crime slant. As usual, the reporting of the FBI findings that the matter was essentially a hoax never received the same prominence as the alleged incident. Predictable the legacy media couldn’t wait to publish supposed evidence of racism still deeply embedded in America’s Deep South.
5 – Trump’s “very fine people” hoax
On August 12, 2017 an avowed neo Nazi and white supremacist Alex Fields deliberately drove into a group of people protesting at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina (held to oppose proposals to pull down a statue of Confederate leader Robert E Lee) killing one person and injuring 35 others. At a press conference 3 days later, President Trump was questioned about the incident and specifically the neo Nazis and said, “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides”. When questioned further Trump clarified that his comment about “very fine people” did NOT apply to the white supremacists. The full press conference is here: the portion in question is around the 11’ mark.
The MSM and Trump’s political opponents immediately accused him of calling the white supremacists “very fine people” igniting a massive wave of liberal outrage and protest. The Atlantic, a reliable left leaning magazine, typified the left’s distortion of Trump’s words in this article and it became an article of faith on the left that Trump defended neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Three years later during the 2020 election campaign, Biden tweeted the hoax yet again.
Trump is renowned for bring inartful and his initial choice of words was clumsy but, with reference to the extreme right-wing group that lay behind the inexcusable actions of Fields, Trump was clear on how unacceptable their behaviour was. Even prominent mostly liberal leaning ‘Fact Checkers’ like USA Today, Snopes and Politifact accurately portrayed the totality of Trump’s comments and described the claims that Trump called the white supremacists “very fine people” as inaccurate. The MSM and the liberal left have long held the view that Trump was and is racist and this mischaracterization was too good to be true for his opponents to pass it up and so the mischaracterization lingered for some time and was re-litigated even during the 2020 Presidential debates.
6 – “Hands up Don’t Shoot” hoax
On August 8, 2014 and young black man by the name of Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri after he resisted arrest for the theft of cigars from a local convenience store. A couple of witnesses to the incident claimed to the media that Brown’s hands were up at the time of the shooting as he supposedly attempted to surrender and at the subsequent large protests and riots in Missouri that the incident provoked, protestors invoked the emotive chant “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” raising their hands in the air thus promoting the explosive insinuation that Brown was innocent and was shot in the back in cold blood by a racist white cop as he tried to surrender. The racial overtones in such an inference were obvious and the MSM has an absolute field day interviewing black activists and protestors and uncritically covered the marches and protests that made this false accusation. Whilst the Black Lives Matter protest movement had begun after the Trayvon Martin incident in Florida in February 2012, the Brown shooting in Missouri and the subsequent protests greatly accelerated the growth of BLM and they very much adopted and widely disseminated the chant. MSM buy in to the story line was best personified in the CNN Newsroom show of December 12, 2014 when four panelists raised their hands in the air and intoned Hands Up Don’t shoot. It became a potent symbol of the struggle against racism by black activists totally supported across the country by white liberals but the incident it involved was entirely fabricated.
The truth was that Office Wilson, a slightly built white man, was struggling for his life against the young, strong, huge, and undoubtedly high on drugs Michael Brown and the discharge of his weapon was in self-defense. Given the explosive nature of the incident, the Federal Department of Justice went over all aspects of the case, bodycam footage and ALL of the witness testimony and concluded that none of the witnesses’ testimony that accorded with the physical and forensic evidence ever stated that there was an attempt by Brown to surrender. Eventually all the major MSM outlets did publish these facts, and all now consider the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” chant to be a fabrication. The claim was made up by friends of Brown with racially motivated intent, likely anxious to cover his violently resisting arrest. Sadly, such hoaxes fuel a commonly held but erroneous belief that many hundreds of back men are killed by white cops all the time when in reality, the vast majority of black men are killed by other black men and that more white people are killed by police in incidents like these than black people.
Conclusion
The common thread with all these hoaxes is the immediate rush to judgement by the MSM that conservative Trump supporting MAGA types have perpetrated some kind of racist act or slur. The history of actual racist legislation, practices and attacks in the Jim Crow South are quickly invoked with hints at the horrors of lynch mobs and all the manifest ways African Americans were badly treated always with attempts to tie Trump as the inspiration for extreme right wing sentiment when the truth is that neo Nazi and white supremacists attitudes that spill over into actual racist attacks are extremely rare. In every instance (and I could cite a dozen more), the media has been wrong. In the event that a left leaning celebrity, a black activist or a Democrat politician or leader makes racist slurs, the MSM either don’t report the incident, give it only a passing brief mention buried at the back end of more important news or they give any left leaning accused individual the benefit of the doubt if there is the inevitable denial and the matter goes no further. Most of the hoaxes above were fueled and even hyped by frequent multiple leading headline MSM attention and only after the damaging inferences concerning conservatives were made were there the eventual retractions and publishing of the truth.
It is sad that there are still many people in New Zealand, even some on the centre right who, despite knowing this tendency of the MSM, are still inclined to believe any lies and distortions told about Trump so widespread is the TDS. In the next episodes, I will examine very much more consequential issues where media ‘fake news’ came to influence the very core of Presidential politics.
