MONOKULTUR

Scott Adams, der er skaberen af Dilbert, forfatter til en række filosofiske værker, politisk kommentator og meget andet, har givet sine 7 bud på de største løgne i Trump æraen, som han mener har påvirket den verden der nu er vores virkelighed – korruptionen, krig i Ukraine, økonomien, valgsvindlen, den politiske vold, migrantkatastrofen, den øgede terrortrussel, polariseringen i befolkningen, fentanyl epidemien, opløsningen af de store byer, racismens genkomst, dyrkelsen af psykisk sygdom, osv

1. Fine People Hoax

2. Drinking Bleach Hoax

3. Russian Collusion Hoax

4. Jan6 was an insurrection

5. Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd

6. Shadow banning isn’t real

7. Climate models predict the future

Hvis man vil have en uddybende liste over medie-løgne i Trump-æraen, har Sharyl Atkinson samlet 158 af slagsen. Her er de 10 første fra august 2016 til januar 2017

1. Aug. 2016-Nov. 2016:

The New York Post published modeling photos of Trump’s wife Melania and reported they were taken in 1995. Various news outlets relied on that date to imply that Melania, an immigrant, had violated her visa status. But the media got the date wrong. Politico was among the news agencies that later issued a photo date correction.

2. Oct. 1, 2016:

The New York Times and other media widely suggested or implied that Trump had not paid income taxes for 18 years. Later, tax return pages leaked to MSNBC ultimately showed that Trump actually paid a higher rate than Democrats Bernie Sanders and President Obama. 

3. Oct. 18, 2016:

In a Washington Post piece not labelled opinion or analysis, Stuart Rothenberg reported that Trump’s path to an electoral college victory was “nonexistent.”

4. Nov. 4, 2016:

USA Today misstated Melania Trump’s “arrival date from Slovenia” amid a flurry of reporting that questioned her immigration status from the mid-1990s.

5. Nov. 9, 2016: 

Early on election night, the Detroit Free Press called the state of Michigan for Hillary Clinton. Trump actually won Michigan.

Nancy Sinatra via Twitter

6. Jan. 20, 2017:

CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” at her father’s song being used at Trump’s inauguration. Sinatra responded, “That’s not true. I never said that. Why do you lie, CNN? Actually I’m wishing him the best.”

 

7. Jan. 20, 2017:

Zeke Miller of TIME reported that President Trump had removed the bust statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. The news went viral. It was false.

8. Jan. 26, 2017: 

Josh Rogin of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “entire senior administrative team” had resigned in protest of Trump. A number of media outlets ranging from politically left to right, including liberal-leaning Vox, stated that claim was misleading or wrong.

9. Jan. 28, 2017

CNBC’s John Harwood reported the Justice Department “had no input” on Trump’s immigration executive order. After a colleague contradicted Harwood’s report, he amended it to reflect that Justice Department lawyers reportedly had reviewed Trump’s order.

10. Jan. 31, 2017:

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny reported the White House set up Twitter accounts for two judges to try to keep Trump’s selection for Supreme Court secret. Zeleny later corrected his report to state that the Twitter accounts had not been set up by the White House.

Det er ikke blot løgne, men også den løgnagtige omgang med sandheden, man afsløres. Eksempel 136 fra 12/7 2020, påstod USA Today at der på Trump merchandise var trykt en nazi-ørn. Da det blev gjort klart at det var en amerikansk ørn, altså den amerikanske national fugl, rettede USA Today, og skrev at man ikke kunne konkludere at ørnen var nazist.

Jeff Gerth skrev i Columbia Journalism Review om tilblivelsen af fiktionen om at Trump havde underløbet den amerikanske valghandling ved hjælp at Putins Rusland

The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.

“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.

Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.

That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.

In fact, Baquet added, “I think we covered that story better than anyone else” and had the prizes to prove it, according to a tape of the event published by Slate. In a statement to CJR, the Times continued to stand by its reporting, noting not only the prizes it had won but substantiation of the paper’s reporting by various investigations. The paper “thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited, and ultimately produced ground-breaking journalism that has proven true time and again,” the statement said.

But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.) At times, Trump seemed almost to be toying with the press, offering spontaneous answers to questions about Russia that seemed to point to darker narratives. When those storylines were authoritatively undercut, the follow-ups were downplayed or ignored.

Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism. The two most inflammatory, and enduring, slogans commandeered by Trump in this conflict were “fake news” and the news media as “the enemy of the American people.” They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public. Both relied on anonymous sources.

Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The phrase “fake news” was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog. The idea that the media were “enemies of the American people” was voiced only once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump, according to a Nexis search.

Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and 56 percent—mostly Republicans and independents—agreed that the media were “truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

Trump, years later, can’t stop looking back. In two interviews with CJR, he made it clear he remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains obsessed with Mueller. His staff has compiled a short video, made up of what he sees as Mueller’s worst moments from his appearance before Congress, and he played it for me when I first went to interview him, just after Labor Day in 2021, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

During my interview with Trump, he appeared tired as he sat behind his desk. He wore golf attire and his signature red MAGA hat, having just finished eighteen holes. But his energy and level of engagement kicked in when it came to questions about perceived enemies, mainly Mueller and the media.

He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job.

“I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

What follows is the story of Trump, Russia, and the press.

Et stykke nutids-historie, der vil blive større med tiden skrevet af en mand, der absolut ikke er en af Trumps “acolytes”, som han taler om at Trump har “perceived enemies” og “remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains obsessed with Mueller.” Den fire artikler lange redegørelse for, hvorledes løgne om russisk samarbejde, var en løgn fabrikeret mellem Demokraterne, efterretningsvæsenet og medierne, der havde til formål at fjerne den folkevalgte præsident. Men Trump er besat af oplevede fjender…