Regimes worldwide are following Donald Trump’s example in ignoring facts and attacking “fake news.”
Regimes worldwide are following Donald Trump’s example in ignoring facts and attacking “fake news.”
Comments
Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press?
ByThe Editorial BoardNov. 30, 2019
@realDonaldTrump
Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency even part time are ridiculous & untrue -FAKE NEWS!
Dec. 2016
As president, Donald Trump first tweeted about “fake news” a few weeks after he was elected.
It wasn’t long before the phrase went viral for leaders around the globe. The Trump tweets continued.
Since Mr. Trump took office, more than 40 foreign governments have invoked the specter of “fake news” to discredit journalists in the United States and abroad.
“Concocting fake news to attract eyeballs is a habitual trick of America’s New York Times, and this newspaper suffered a crisis of credibility for its fakery,” theChinese governmentdeclared after The Timesbroke the newsthis month of government documents detailing the internment of Uighurs, Kazaks and other Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Who would have guessed that history had such a perverse development in store for us? As the historian Timothy Snyderhas written in The Times, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came up with the slogan “Lügenpresse” — translated as “lying press” — in order to discredit independent journalism. Now the tactic has been laundered through an American president, Donald Trump, who adopted the term “fake news” as a candidate and has used it hundreds of times in office.
That is how, barely a generation after the murder of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps, the term “fake news” has come to be deployed so brazenly by another repressive regime to act against another minority, to cover up the existence of prison camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
Mr. Trump surely didn’t intend this. He’s not a strategic or particularly ideological person. He tends to act instead out of personal or political interest and often on impulse, based on what he thinks his core supporters in the country or the cable television studios want from him. When he yanks troops out of Syria or pardons war criminals, it’s safe to assume he’s not thinking about the long-term balance of power in the Middle East or the reputation and morale of the American military. He is maneuvering, as ever, for some perceived immediate political advantage.
So it is with his attacks on the news media. Mr. Trump loves the press. He has catered to it and been nurtured by it since he first began inventing himself as a celebrity in the 1970s. But he has needed a way to explain to his followers why there are so many upsetting revelations about incompetent administration officials, broken campaign promises and Trump family self-dealing. He’s now tweeted out the term “fake news” more than600times.
Playing the ‘Fake News’ Card
Since December 2016, President Trump has tweeted about “fake news” at least once a month. Other countries have followed suit.
“Fake news” tweets by month
Impeachment
inquiry announced
40
Twelve
Russian intelligence
operatives indicted
30
20
10
0
2017
2018
2019
Countries citing
“fake news”
Impeachment
inquiry announced
“Fake news” tweets by month
40
30
Twelve Russian intelligence
operatives indicted
20
10
0
2017
2018
2019
Countries citing
“fake news”
When an American president attacks the independent press, despots rush to imitate his example. Dozens of officials around the world — including leaders of other democracies — have used the term since Mr. Trump legitimized it. Why bother to contend with facts when you can instead just pretend they don’t exist? That’s what the Chinese government did. It simply called the Times report fake, though it was based on the government’s own documents, and declared it “unworthy of refutation.”
Following the same Oval Office script, a senior government official in Burundi trotted out “fake news” to explain why his government wasbanning the BBC. In Myanmar, where the government is systematically persecuting an ethnic minority, the Rohingya,an official told The Timesthat the very existence of such a group is “fake news.” The Russian foreign ministry uses the image of a big red “FAKE” stampon its websiteto mark news reports that it does not like.
Jordan has introduced a law allowing the government to punish those who publish “false news.”Cameroonhas actually jailed journalists for publishing “fake news.” Chadbannedsocial media access nationwide for more than a year, citing “fake news.”
AsShepard Smith, a former Fox News anchor, recently told attendees at theannualdinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Intimidation and vilification of the press is now a global phenomenon. We don’t have to look far for evidence of that.”
The press needs to be scrutinized. Its mistakes should be called out, its biases analyzed and exposed. But Mr. Trump has licensed a far more dangerous approach.
The rise of the epithet “fake news” as a weapon is occurring at an already perilous moment for the supply of information about the world as it truly is. The financial foundations of an independent press are eroding under the influence of the internet, which has simultaneously become a global conduit for malicious falsehoods. It’s harder and harder for anyone to know what stories to believe. A world in which governments and citizens can’t agree on a shared set of facts is one in which only the most powerful thrive.
The health of democracy, in the United States and around the world, depends on better answers to this challenge. Rather than making matters worse, politicians should be pursuing those answers, for example by pressing leading internet companies to accept responsibility for the roles they have already assumed as the world’s leading information publishers. The press has to do its part as well, by committing itself to a forthright accounting of any mistakes, an unending struggle against bias in news and an uncompromising pursuit of truth.
Some American politicians, fromMainetoAlabama, have followed Mr. Trump’s example. But others have been wise enough to dissent, however cautiously. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, offered a rare if tepid defense of the media in August 2017. “My view is that most news is not fake,” hetolda Louisville audience.
This month, Mr. McConnell went to the Senate floor to highlight The Times’s reporting on Xinjiang,describing the documentspublished by The Times as “a handbook for this Orwellian campaign to effectively erase a religious and ethnic minority in a region that is supposed to be legally distinct from the rest of China.”
The capacity of news organizations to produce this kind of journalism — and to reach an audience that will listen — is contingent and fragile. Mr. Trump shows no sign of seeing this bigger picture, or, perhaps, of caring about it. So it falls to the rest of us, particularly leaders like Mr. McConnell, to tell the truth about a free press, to proclaim its value, in the United States and around the world.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Notes
Our list of foreign governments using “fake news” and related phrases is not exhaustive. We did not include examples from the administrations of leaders who have since left office. The dates reflect when a leader’s usage of “fake news” was reported.
In some instances it was difficult to differentiate between well-intentioned warnings about actual fake news, such as disinformation campaigns, and self-serving attacks on honest reporting.
Graphics by Gus Wezerek