I saw the president call the ABC reporter “fake news.”
That’s a laugh.
The reporter was asking about his obsequiousness with murderous Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman while Don and Eric, aka the Crypto Sibs, do business with his government.
Asking the president about important matters like that is the furthest thing from “fake news.” It IS news.
But I’m going to tell you about fake news — certifiably artificial fodder — and how it invaded our president’s eye sockets and caused the indefensible use of troops on a peaceful city.
First, let’s turn on the old 35mm projector for a turn-of-another-century newsreel.
In clacking sepia tone, doughboys in ankle boots and four-pinch Stetsons hustle off to Cuba. They’re going to fight Spaniards. Hundreds won’t return, but war with Spain? What an adventure.
Problem: the case against Spain is wholly specious. Did it blow up the USS Maine? Or was it a boiler blast? Either cause is a hunch, but war is so romantic and doable.
Cut to the offices of the New York Journal, where William Randolph Hearst is all in on a war and a newsstand bonanza. Journal headlines scream, “SPAIN GUILTY!” – the Maine was “destroyed by a floating mine.”
Clack, clack, clack. Hearst cables artist Frederic Remington with instructions.
“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” Hearst advises.
And war it is, thanks to fake news that earns Hearst and his jingoistic print rivals the label “Yellow Journalism.”
That term came from a comic-strip character always looking for trouble — the Yellow Kid. Today we have a cartoon president.
In early September, our Yellow Kid was looking for a reason — any reason — to stir anger and fear among the unwashed, and to capture headlines.
He flicked on Fox and found it: Violence in Portland!!
“Riots raging outside ICE facility,” Fox reported, with pictures to match.
Except it wasn’t true. It was Fox fiction. Disruptions that night in Portland were largely tame. The video Fox used, however, wasn’t. It was from the tumult five years earlier, 2020, over the murder of George Floyd. Fox used the footage repeatedly.
Our president, who gets his reading from the lips of right-wing talking heads, didn’t investigate further.
What he’d seen on television was “unbelievable.”
A few days later he ordered the National Guard to Portland.
If you have trouble believing this, read a report from ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonprofit news organization. The link: tinyurl.com/mwb5kmfd
“Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025,” reads the report.
“We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests.
“Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.”
Fake news. Fake news. How is it that anyone believes the network that bought into the “stolen election” movement to the point that it libeled two voting machine companies without any evidence, ultimately owing Dominion Voting systems $787.5 million for its recklessness?
How, if it’s an actual news organization, did Fox not clean house of the on-screen actors behind this horrific breach of journalistic standards?
Simple: Because the actors are actors. Journalists work for ABC.
Let this not distract our glare, however, from the elected official, the man on our payroll, who ordered troops into Portland based on next to nothing.
On another front, the yellow one now is bombing boats at sea and threatening war with Venezuela.
The other day The New York Times reported on a phony pretext to this involving the misappropriation of a Venezuelan term.
The president has said repeatedly that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro commands a terrorist entity known as Cartel de los Soles which aims to kill Americans through the drug trade.
There’s no such terrorist organization, reports the Times, quoting experts on Latin America. Someone inclined toward Fox-ticious claims doesn’t dare inquire with those who know.
“Cartel de los Soles” for Venezuelans, the Time reports, denotes nothing specific. Instead is a broad and mocking term for a bunch of military crooks with salad on their shoulders.
Disregard this, Mr. President. Denounce The New York Times. Denounce as “fake” anything a reasonable person would see as true journalism.
Know that if war is what our president wants (See: “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2003), the president’s favorite “news” channel will supply the pictures.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
