SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
journalism
Wake Up Media! Here's a Bullshit Detector for Trump 2.0
The great fascist fabulist is returning. The Fourth Estate, battered and bruised as it is, must stand guard and be prepared to fight back on behalf of the people.
Jan 19, 2025
“Facts don’t cease to exist because they are denied.” —Aldous Huxley
Despite all his lies, crimes, impeachments, bad polls as well as a scandal-free opponent and a strong economy, Donald Trump defeated his opponent by, among other reasons, exploiting polemical sleights-of-hand. Witnessing the legacy corporate media cling to its “both-sides” template in the face of his rhetorical war was akin to watching a video-game battle between muskets and drones.
Like Trump, cold-blooded thinkers from Catherine the Great to Machiavelli have understood how in political life the “first lie” usually wins and there’s a “liars dividend” since normal people tend to believe what they’re told by authorities, especially when it’s consistent with their “confirmation bias.” (Supporters of Mussolini's fascism had a phrase that simplified matters: “Il Duce is always right.”)
In this context, disinformation and gaslighting spread like hot embers to dry forests in 80 mph winds. Sadly, it appears to only be getting worse: next day fact-checking and letters-to-the-editor are certainly desirable but no match for invisible algorithms, A.I. content, corporate-owned media, and reactionary tech bros who can reach a billion people in an instant. Has there ever been a faster-rising or more influential press lord than Elon Musk?
Biden's farewell warning against a growing "oligarchy" of political/economic/technological power will likely endure as a benchmark to measure Trump's yearning to be a "Dictator on Day One" (as if he'd stop 24 hours later).
In this hinge of history, can the media build a new template to hold the new billionaire bullies accountable or will it merely be deja vu in Trump 2.0?
Admittedly, there’s little expectation that the emerging Trump-Musk duet and their fellow oligarchs will alter their impulse to replace facts with fiction as a way to advance their financial ends and ideological aims. As the Number One's in the world in their respective categories, the tandem of these two strongmen understandably believe that might-makes-right for them. Similarly, it’s nearly psychologically impossible to sway hard-core MAGAs who merge their identities with those two, those who would insist that D.E I. caused the Los Angeles fires of recent weeks and that reverse racism (whatever that is) is worse than the abhorrent racism they've espoused.
Still, after the two national candidates in 2024 were separated by only 1.5% of the popular vote (a “massive landslide” it was not), there are small but potentially decisive percentages of swing voters—traditional Republicans, anti-Trump independents, and non-voting Democrats and progressives—who can make tip the scales in 2026 and 2028 between an America in the grip of a new class of billionaire bullies and one that reverts to a nation governed by and for the people.
The first step is for traditional executives, editors, journalists—as well as fretful Democrats in 26 purple congressional districts—to be armed with blunt language that was largely sidelined in the 2024 general election yet could disrupt Team Trump's propaganda and put him on the political ropes. After writing three books on Trump, what follows are eight types of his “twistications” (Jefferson’s word) and how participants in this struggling democracy can decode them as we enter the next Trumplandia of media and politics.
1. Assertions & Adjectives. Just recycling battle-tested assertions and adjectives no matter how ridiculous sure beats researching the facts. His most popular lines— “The Biden Crime Family…it was a perfect phone call…’tariff’ is the most beautiful word…January 6th was a day of love” —can only work if your target audience is as credulous as the jurors in the cult classic Idiocracy.
Which Trump understands. He simply told a confidant after his political escape from the Access Hollywood tape, “You just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And when former aide Anthony Scaramucci asked why he lied so much at a rally, he replied, “Look, a billion people now know me and half hate my guts. But the other half are a great market for my brands, properties, product, campaigns.”
Two extremely effective examples of assertions passing as evidence are “Fake Media” and “Liberal.” They have become enormously powerful epithets for those who lack the time, ability, or motive to think independently.
Whenever reports show that the GOP is doing something scandalous, Trump just utters the near-magical words “Fake Media” to erase any controversy. Trump once admitted to Leslie Stahl that he "constantly berates Fake News to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
As for “Liberal” (aka, CRT, DEI, Deep State, Woke), it too can paralyze the cognitive abilities of MAGA audiences. Decades later, journalists—and defensive Democrats too—should no longer turn the other cheek when hearing this polemical kill shot. “So which of these ‘liberal’ policies would you reverse—Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, the Freedom of information Act, environmental protection laws, labor laws, health safety rules and agencies—all were passed by liberals and opposed by conservatives?” It’s past time to re-focus such conversations away from abstractions like "Big Government" to specifics like "whether government should make sure that your children don’t burn to death in a low-speed rear-end collision."
2. Playing on Fears. Trump told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t really want to use the word—fear.” Comedian Larry Elmore put it best when he joked, or appeared to joke, that “Trump is our FDR since the only thing he has is fear itself.”
This goes well beyond the normal political anxiety of, say, losing an election or a job. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows presumably now regrets going along with his boss’s orders on January 6 because “I was afraid of being yelled at.” Trump now routinely deploys fear of actual violence to get his way.
For example, when rebutting rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said that some of his supporters might have to use “their Second Amendment rights.” After he blamed the FBI for investigating him with a lawful warrant, one enthusiast shot up a Bureau office and was killed. And when irked in court, he personally assailed judges, their families and clerks who then invariably were subjected to scores of death threats. Hence the gag-orders imposed on Trump as if he were a vengeful mob boss.
Sen. Mitt Romney admitted as much when some fellow Republicans privately acknowledged that they voted to acquit Trump during two impeachment trials because they were afraid for themselves and their families.
3. Big Lies. What percent of sentient adults don’t think that he relentlessly lies? That even includes many followers who shrug and say, “Well, they all do it.”
But no one in American history has remotely lied so voluminously or bigly as Donald J. Trump. The Washington Post famously documented over 30,000 lies or falsehoods in only his first term, including 22 per day in his final year.
Then there are the Big Lies on the Goebbels’ scale, like repeatedly implying that Obama was a foreigner, Trump won the 2020 election because of invisible voter fraud, and Biden’s DOJ was behind multiple indictments in several jurisdictions around the country. Up to now, such falsehoods merely resulted in news stories burying the mild admonition that articles that “lacking evidence, Trump today claimed that…” Something more riveting will be needed this time around.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ” – George Orwell
4. False equivalence – WhatAbout-ism. Trump can turn any criticism into an attack-line if he can find some Democratic example in the past say hundred years. So when he rejected the outcome of the 2020 election and 139 House Members refused to certify the results, Trumpers indignantly replied, “neither did Hillary Clinton…and Democrats also refused certification.” Except that Clinton did concede the day after her loss. And while a few Democrats did question the results and begged questions of possible misconduct, they had no expectation of actually blocking certification.
The difference between these two examples could not be more stark.
5. Cherry-picking. When data is overwhelmingly against Trump—say the polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted and 97 percent of scientists agree that current trends could lead to ecocide—not a problem. Trump calls it a “hoax” or finds one study alleging that 300,000 years ago the climate was just as hot. That is, isolate one black swan to imply all are black.
Or if too many swastikas appear on signs at a rally where white protestors chant “Jews will not replace us,” Sean Hannity can announce that “Democrat Bob Byrd was a Klansman.” Which was true…100 years ago when he was in his twenties and before he recanted to become a renowned senator. Indeed, one party now contains not all but most American white supremacists and it’s not the Democratic Party.
6. Anti-Science. Because the U.S.S.R. believed in the perfect “Soviet Man,” Stalin embraced biologist Lysenko’s ridiculous view that learned traits can be inherited. And the Kremlin delayed responding to the lethal Chernobyl meltdown because they thought it couldn’t happen.
A president of course needn’t be a scientist—indeed we’ve never elected one. But they should ideally be open-minded and resilient when national emergencies strike. That means according to the scientific method when facts lead to conclusions rather than conclusions leading to “facts.”
With each recent year being “the hottest ever,” Team Trump’s political hostility to rapid climate change is like denying the comet in Don’t Look Up, as the calamitous Los Angels fires demonstrated. Vaccine denialism too was once a fringe view. But MAGAs resistance to vaccines during Covid-19 caused many needless deaths, with more likely to come if RFK Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary.
7. Projections. Trump’s greatest homage to Goebbels was embracing his own rhetorical maneuver to “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty of.” Like when Trump accused Robert Mueller of ”treason” and Democrats of ”election interference” when they brought indictments against Trump for “election interference.” And after Biden last year laid out a bill of particulars on how Trump was a dire threat to democracy, the latter claimed that “Joe’s abuses of power will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history.”
The goal here is not to actually win a policy debate but to get inattentive voters to throw up their hands.
8. Rhetorical Questions. Few politicians under fire can resist the age-old device of planting a false premise in the form of a rhetorical question in order to mislead audiences to a wrong conclusion.
So candidate Trump urged Black voters to support him in 2016 because “what could go wrong?” Or Tucker Carlson wondered “why should I not side with Putin” during his genocidal invasion of Ukraine? Donald Jr. asked after January 6th: “Do we really want to pretend it’s not a false flag?” Vivek Ramaswamy questioned whether “there were any federal agents on those planes on 9/11…I’m not saying there were but it’s a fair question.”
No it’s not.
Historically, bi-partisan debates saw exaggerations but rarely blatant falsehoods…until Reagan’s “Reign of Error” came along in 1981 (that being the title of a book on the subject by this author.)
Today, however, we’re in a different dimension as Trump normalizes disinformation and falsehoods. Like the difference between comfortably warm and life-threatening boiling water, it’s a difference not merely in degree but kind. A functioning Democracy can survive a leader and party that occasionally deploys hyperbole, tells “stretchers” (Twain), or even lies. (Ike certainly lied over the U-2 incident, which was an exception then justified by the stakes.)
But since legislation often requires compromises between two major parties, a democracy cannot survive when one side believes that it can get away with creating a fabulous alternate universe that infected some recent confirmation hearings chaired by Senate Republicans.
The American media understands this when it applies to, say, an authoritarian like Putin but has, with exceptions, refused to assume the same about Trump despite all the supporting evidence. Yet in the insight of Yale language professor David Bromwich, “the presentation of factual truth matters because we have no substitute world to live in when this world is gone.”
How can the Fourth Estate adjust to another post-truth era—one even more vicious and sophisticated that the first? Will they even attempt a new playbook? Already, MSNBC is strengthening its prime-time lineup for Trump Redux. The Washington Post, meanwhile, seems ready to embrace anticipatory genuflection due to the business conflicts of owner Jeff Bezos. At "The "Paper of Record," New York Times publisher and executive editor, A.G. Sultzburger and Joseph Kahn, have given no indication of changing their model of merely being a conveyor belt of Trumpian disinformation in the face of the most radical revanchists in American history.
For now, independent news outlets, podcasts, and writers at some platforms are objecting to giving a standard “benefit of the doubt” to government officials who don’t deserve it. And new models of non-profit news and tax-supported platforms—we subsidize farmers because making food is urgent even if not always profitable—so why not 'food for thought' as we enter this unprecedented four year stress test?
Are our major civic institutions ready to acquiesce to Trump and his band of oligarchs who blithely claim that disinformation is "mere speech," that 1,400 people convicted of a violent riot on January 6 are now "hostages" and that the catastrophic L.A. fires were the result of D.E.I. and Mayor Karen Bass' trip to Ghana?
January 20th is a good time for our major media to understand how a fascist oligarchy—of the kind we now see in Russia and Hungary, and in Italy and Germany in the early Thirties—could allow neoliberal capitalism to purchase democracy to write the next (if not the last) chapter of our nearly 250-year experiment in majority rule.
Surely smart publishers have learned lessons from their failure to hold Trump accountable in the nine years since he came down that elevator, and understand the insane irony that a small country born in reaction to a powerful monarchy would voluntarily accept a home-grown version 248 years later.
Who will emerge as the Keynes of journalism to explain that, when it comes to truth, might can’t make right?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Critics Warn Media Outlets Failing to Explain Climate Cause Behind Los Angeles Fires
"Too much of the coverage has simply ignored the climate crisis altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between such megafires and a hotter, dryer planet is unequivocal," wrote the founders of Covering Climate Now.
Jan 16, 2025
Covering the who, what, when, where, and why is journalism 101. So why are too few media outlets explaining the role that the climate crisis plays in the "why" behind the fires ravaging the Los Angeles region?
That's the central question posed in an opinion piece published in The Guardian and elsewhere on Thursday authored by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, the founders of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of over 500 news outlets aimed at improving climate coverage, of which Common Dreams is a part.
Hertsgaard and Pope wrote that "too much of the coverage has simply ignored the climate crisis altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between such megafires and a hotter, dryer planet is unequivocal."
They added: "Too many stories have framed the fires as a political spat between U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and California elected officials instead of a horrifying preview of what lies ahead if humans don't rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Too often, bad-faith disinformation has been repeated instead of debunked."
Misinformation, in many instances stemming from right-leaning sources, have proliferated since the blazes broke out last week. Trump in a social media post appeared to point the finger at California's statewide water management plans for fire hydrants running dry as firefighters fought the blazes last week. Southern California does have plenty water stored, but the city's infrastructure was not designed to respond to a fire as the large as the ones that broke out, experts toldPBS. Another user on the platform X falsely claimed that California turned away fire trucks from Oregon because of their emission levels, according to KQED.
Hertsgaard and Pope also called for outlets to name names. "Rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies that have made gargantuan amounts of money even as they knowingly lied about their products dangerously overheating the planet," they wrote.
While the fires are still burning, researchers are already drawing the links between climate change and the blazes. In a thread on Bluesky, the climate scientist Daniel Swain explained the concept of climate "hydroclimate whiplash"—which southern California experienced in 2024—and how this can create ideal conditions for fires to spread.
The authors of the opinion piece noted that there have been bright spots when it comes to covering the fires with an eye toward the climate emergency and debunking false and misleading claims about the fires. The duo highlight a Timestory that is titled "The LA fires show the reality of living in a world with 1.5C of warming" and a column written by the Los Angeles Times' Sammy Roth, which began: "Los Angeles is burning. Fossil fuel companies laid the kindling."
Hertsgaard and Pope wrote, "When a house is on fire, by all means let journalism show us the flames."
"But tell us why the house is burning, too," they added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How US Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view.
Jan 15, 2025
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
- Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
- The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
- Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
- Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
- Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
- Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.
As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.
The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”
The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.
This piece was originally published by MediaNorth. It is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular