Molly Jong-Fast: Trump Trial Reveals the Real Fake News

[Nevilledog]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-trial-reveals-the-real-fake-news

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https://archive.li/eJM4c

Projection has long been Donald Trump’s superpower. Since the start of his presidential run in 2015, the former president has relentlessly attacked the mainstream media, often calling it the “Lamestream Media” or quite simply “Fake News.” I always assumed this name-calling was part and parcel of Trump’s autocratic playbook, but after watching the first few days of Trump’s trial, it’s grown increasingly clear that this rhetoric is actually less applicable to the media and more applicable to himself.

Right now, in a Manhattan courtroom, we are hearing the stories of how Trump worked hand in hand with David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, to turn the trashy tabloid magazine into a propaganda machine. Trump’s first and (very likely only) preelection criminal trial focuses on how Trump and his friend, Pecker, killed stories about Trump’s alleged affairs by using cash payments to buy the silence of Trump’s alleged paramours—a practice called “catch and kill.” In essence, stories were purchased so they’d never run.

If there is anything “lame” or “fake” about the news media, it’s practices like these, which no editor or reporter of good standing would ever consider using, or that political figures would expect, as MSNBC host and White House veteran Jen Psaki pointed out this week. “Feels crazy this may need to be said,” noted Psaki, but “campaign and White House comms staff do not work with media to pay off potential sources of bad stories…ever.”

Yet, catch and kill was just one part of the Enquirer’s skullduggery: Pecker also produced outlandish news stories about Trump’s political opponents, like Ted Cruz (“Ted Cruz’s Father—Caught With JFK Assassin”), Ben Carson (“Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain”), and Marco Rubio (“‘Family Man’ Marco Rubio’s Love Child Stunner!”). Later, after Trump won the primary, the magazine turned its attention to his 2016 general competitor, Hillary Clinton, by putting her on the magazine’s cover and filling it with negative headlines that painted her as everything from “corrupt” to “racist” at least 15 times in the five-month run-up to November, according to the Guardian. Headlines like these saturated the checkout aisles in grocery stores, delis, and big-box retailers, serving as mini billboards that gave an impression that candidates committed similar ethical lapses—a tactic Steve Bannon proudly coined as “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”

*snip*