The Self Inflicted Wound of Fake News

Fox News is Jubilant.  The NY Times, NBC, and everyone oversold the Trump-Russia Collusion story.   Thad Guyer calls it suicide for the liberal media.

I disagree.  I call it the media wising up to the new reality of journalism.

Frequent Guest Post author Thad Guyer makes a strong point: that the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media pushed a false story through leaked information that Trump and Russia directly colluded to rig the 2016 election, and it backfired on them. 

Republican Senators asked former FBI Director Comey if those stories were true.  Comey said they were not true.  Comey is the star witness for the argument that Trump overtly obstructed justice.  The media loves Comey, the tall, good looking, measured, good-guy hero, and yet he declared flat out that the media stories were wrong.

Click:  Sean Hannity: We were right, they were wrong!

Guyer calls it an assassination, of the media by their beloved Comey.  Certainly Fox News's prime Trump cheerleader agrees.  Sean Hannity is crowing.

 "Biggest bombshell revelation. . . lies, innuendo, and propaganda and misinformation . . . these idiots in the media, almost all of them, have been flat out wrong. . . ."

My own take is different.  

I believe that nobody other than media critics, graduate students, and attorneys consume the media with the critical eye that Guyer brought to this issue, and that the question of Trump committing actual criminal obstruction of justice will be handled in a quasi-judicial forum following more discovery by the independent investigation.   In short, I think Guyer's observations are correct, but irrelevant.   Guyer is thinking like a top litigator, not like a TV consumer and voter.  It is to his credit, but it is also a form of blindness, the incapacity that comes from being too intelligent and diligent.

Trump is the one in the pit.

I believe Trump taught political observers a big lesson, if we will accept it.  Political messaging is big picture body-language dumbed down professional wrestling.  It is not a legal brief; it is a brawl between archetypes.  Trump is the alpha male bully, the bad guy who is on our side, presumably.  Now the big guy is shown to be acting for himself, not us.  He is stuck in his own mess, a smoke of innuendo and sneakiness and coded gangster talk.

Consistent with that role of alpha bully, Trump asserts absurd positions that he then stands behind, intransigent and unapologetic.  They may well be factually untrue and indefensible by Republican allies, but Trump says them proudly and they have a "ring of truth" to them.  Steven Colbert artfully named the process: "truthiness."  

It worked with the Trump base.   Saying that Barrack Obama's birth certificate was fake and that he was disqualified to be president "felt right" to his target audience of Republicans and racists and people suspicious of people with the middle name of Hussain.  Many people who observed it understood it to be false but were oddly charmed by Trump's action, understanding it to be trolling and simply political slapstick, and if they were disinclined to like Obama anyway Trump's actions seemed like harmless fun.

Trump's own team understood that much of what Trump says is factually ludicrous but nevertheless important and believable.  Don't take Trump literally but take him seriously.

I agree with Guyer that there is no credible evidence made public yet of direct Trump-Russia collusion to rig the election.  No matter.  There is plenty of evidence, or intimations of evidence of contacts between key people in the Trump campaign and Russians.   Call it smoke, not fire.  That is the trap for Trump: the subsequent affirmative actions to stop the smoke.  Nixon did not burglarize the DNC headquarters in 1972; agents of campaign aides did.   It was not the crime by Nixon; it was the cover-up by Nixon.  

Trump's closest associates are thought to be involved in some way, maybe, with collusion with the Russians.   How ridiculously vague and insubstantial a sentence.  It is just suspicion.  But suspicion and questions are enough, as birtherism demonstrated.

Alpha male bully archetype Trump--drawn to counterpunch at every possible insult--acted right up to the edge of obstruction of justice, and some will argue over the edge,  and bragged about it on camera to a reporter.  The detailed story--the one Guyer examines--is that there is no evidence against Trump personally, but the "ring of truth" story, the "seriously-but-not-literally" story, is that Trump is up to his waist in the mess of Russian collusion and he is lying about it and protecting his friends who are lying about it and taking the Fifth Amendment.  

The New York Times got that big picture right.  But what about the details?  Isn't the NY Times the newspaper of record, and isn't accuracy an essential part of their brand identity?

Yes, but the damage to that newspaper has already taken place as Trump and Fox redefined the landscape of journalism.  Each side gets its own facts.  That is the new political journalism truth.  People don't believe authorities anymore.  The failure of the educated elites to manage America's foreign policy in the Middle East and its economy at home in the financial crisis, and the failure of those elites to create policies that created a pathway to the middle class for the non-college, empowered Trump's populist revolt.   Trump's attack on "the media" with their "fake news" was really a generalized attack on educated coastal elites, and the NY Times is an archetypal element of it.

(Harvard is another, and through fortunate timing I was at Harvard 4 weeks after the election observing up close experts still pole-axed and glassy eyed by the election results.  They couldn't believe what had just happened.   The public had rejected expertise, consciously and intentionally.  They didn't want reasoned policy shaped by multilingual experts with Ph.D. degrees and 40 year experience.  They preferred and demanded policy created by an amateur who shoots from the hip.  The Harvard experts shook their heads in wonderment and shame.)

Even Fox has to admit it.  There is smoke, if not fire.

When the voters rejected expertise they also rejected an expectation that their news sources be right in the details.   Fox has its truth, the rest of the media has theirs.

So Trump didn't collude, but Jared Kushner did?  Close enough.  Trump didn't do treason, but he maybe obstructed justice when he gave cryptic messages about "our thing" to imply that Comey had agreed--or should agree--to kill an investigation?   Close enough.  

The NY Times got the big picture right.   They weren't assassinated by Comey.  They were vindicated by his testimony, in the big sloppy world of big picture messaging.

But Thad Guyer sees it differently, and in closer detail, and readers can decide what makes sense to them.  I see professional wrestling: the narcissistic thug gets caught by his own vulnerability, faked into a bonehead counter-move by defending against a fake move, and the crowd likes it because the bully is getting his comeuppance.   But in legal briefs, facts matter and words matter, and that is the world in which Guyer normally works.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:   “James Comey Has Rid Trump of the Meddlesome Priest Named the New York Times”

Thad Guyer

Fired FBI director Jim Comey was at the ready with his Henry II quote when asked if he understood as “an order” Trump’s expression that “I hope you can see your way to ... letting Flynn go.” Comey replied: “Yes. Yes, it rings in my ear as kind of, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ ”See, Washington Post, “Why did James Comey Say...”, (Jun 8, 2017 https://goo.gl/jiWkOd). The reference was to King Henry II using similar words as an indirect order that his henchmen assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett in 1164, which they promptly did. (See, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket).  Had Trump been asking Comey to assassinate someone, he certainly obliged with ironic flair—Comey assassinated the New York Times and the liberal media in general. 

Comey calmly disemboweled the media for reporting leakers’ misinformation. (The entire June 8, 2017 hearing video and transcript can be found here: https://goo.gl/qMrU9x.)  As to the New York Times in particular for reporting false information, Comey stated under oath:

“SEN. COTTON: On February 14th, the New York Times published a story, the headline of which was, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” *** Would it be fair to characterize that story as almost entirely wrong? 

COMEY: Yes.”

“SEN. RISCH: [S]o the American people can understand this, that report by the New York Times was not true. Is that a fair statement? 

COMEY: In — in the main, it was not true.”

In its own podcast the next morning, the NYT dished out some back-handed payback to Comey, labeling him “a leaker” while the rest of the liberal media tried to say he was merely “publicizing”, not “leaking”. Listen to NYT The Daily, “James Comey’s testimony on Thursday reveals that the leak of a James Comey memo was orchestrated by ... James Comey”, (Jun 9, 2017 https://t.co/6yPdZyjuts).

As to the media in general reporting false information against Trump, Comey testified:

“LANKFORD: You had mentioned before about some news stories and news accounts, ... you were stunned about how wrong they got the facts? 

COMEY: Yes. There have been many, many stories purportedly based on classified information about — well, about lots of stuff, but especially about Russia, that are just dead wrong.”

“COMEY: [The thing about] stories about classified information, is that people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on. And those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it”

As to media bias in only highlighting leaks that hurt Trump, Comey demurred:

“RUBIO: [W]hy, of all the things in this investigation, the only thing that’s never been leaked is the fact that the president was not personally under investigation?

 COMEY: I don’t know.”

Comey’s assault on the media for false leaks, combined with his own leaking, has likely doomed the media campaign to bring down Donald Trump. See, WSJ podcast, “The Fallout From Jim Comey Week”, (Jun 9, 2017, https://goo.gl/9dRqDG).  To better understand why the "obstruction of justice" claims against Trump are appearing ever more hollow from both a legal and political perspective, listen to the NPR podcast from On Point, “Do We Know If Trump Obstructed Justice?”, (Jun 9, 2017 https://t.co/73ECeM9pVw).

The result of the “Comey Week” festivities (as enjoyable as it was), is that Trump, his supporters, and many objective observers, view Comey’s testimony as having delivered major vindication to Trump, and lasting damage to the media upon which Democrats have relied to win elections.  Comey probably did rid Trump of his “meddlesome priest”.