Why the Media Can't Tell the Truth About Donald Trump's Lies

By Ben Collins, The Daily Beast

25 November 15

 

The Donald is ‘controversial’ but never flat-out wrong in the press, because it cares more about being ‘fair’ and ‘objective’ than anything else.

n Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump retweeted an objective lie. The lie claimed that 81 percent of murdered white people are killed by black people. In truth, 84 percent of murdered white people are murdered by other white people, almost the exact opposite the claim. Not only were the statistics wrong, but the tweet cited the “Crime Statistics Bureau—San Francisco.”

This organization doesn’t exist.

The bureau was the creation of a white supremacist on Twitter, advancing a racist meme with a  lie. Trump hasn’t taken down the tweet, apologized, or even acknowledged it.

But because of the way the Internet values its information, Donald Trump lied again, and he will once again get away with it.

Here were the headlines from mainstream outlets about Trump’s entirely made up piece of information:

“Trump Tweet on Black Crime Sets Off Firestorm,” wrote Fox News.

“Fact Checking Donald Trump’s Questionable ‘USA Crime Statistics’ Tweet Broken Down by Race,” wrote the New York Daily News.

“Trump Takes Heat for Tweet About Black Murder Rates,” wrote The Hill.

Noticeably absent from these headlines was that Donald Trump’s tweet was entirely fabricated. The Hill’s doesn’t even dig into the credibility of the statistics until the ninth paragraph.

Donald Trump lied. And yet traditional news organizations can’t or won’t call him that in the name of “objectivity”—appearing to favor one party over another—even if one candidate is spreading a rumor that unfairly maligns an entire race.

“The incentive for candidates [to lie] is that most media outlets don’t have the resources to check for accuracy immediately, but since the U.S. news media is based on the commercial model—and more eyeballs on the page or the screen is good for business—the networks love it when someone like Donald Trump says outrageous stuff,” Michelle Amazeen, an assistant communications professor at Rider University, told The Daily Beast.

“Fact-checking rains on the parade of that revenue model.”

Amazeen co-authored a study for the American Press Institute that largely had great things to say about fact-checking. Prevalent fact-checking operations like Politifact or FactCheck.org do, in fact, serve as a deterrent for candidates who are thinking about lying during an election cycle, she and her co-authors found.

But when a candidate figures out that he can say whatever he wants in order to advance a narrative and can have immediate benefits—and knowingly exploits it—all bets are off.

“Beyond being ineffective, correcting claims about a highly controversial issue can actually backfire. People who are diehard believers hold their beliefs even more firmly when those beliefs are challenged,” Amazeen wrote earlier this year in The Washington Post.

“We know that a lot of people don’t even read past the first sentence, so the initial information gets passed around and, unfortunately, there’s not much stopping them,” Amazeen told The Daily Beast. “Fact-checking is spreading, but not nearly as fast as that first information.”

As Poynter’s Craig Silverman once put it, “Initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction.”

Trump’s candidacy turned misinformation into ammunition in just four easy steps.

First, say or tweet an incorrect piece of information, knowing any network that calls you on it will be dubbed partial by one of the two political parties.

Two, watch as mainstream news outlets write about the controversy of your statements—as the right and left line up on predictable sides—but not call you out on it. The stories will often present an objective fact-check, placed with seemingly equal weight to what one of your supporters feels is true. “Objectivity” and “balance” means treating someone who is factually wrong, even lying, the same as the person who is right and honest.

Three, fire up your base when one news organization dares to disobey the second rule. Call them “biased,” “failing,” or “unfair.”

Four, watch your Q rating soar!

And Trump’s campaign is built on lies more than any other in recent memory.

“This cycle is very different with the number of flat-out wrong claims,” said Angie Drobnic-Holan, editor-in-chief of Politifact. “Some of our fact-checks are not all clear cut. Some are in the mostly true range, and that’s fine. But this year, the amount of things that did not or could not have happened? Just go through our ‘Pants On Fire’ section. You’ll see way more examples than in previous years.”

Politifact’s “Pants On Fire” designation is reserved for the most severe, unbelievable lies told by politicians on any side of the aisle.

“Take Donald Trump’s scorecard and compare it to Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney at this time [in the election cycle]. Bachmann is probably the closest parallel, because she said some very provocative things that turned out to be completely wrong,” she said. “It’s not even close. And she only won the Ames poll, then that was it. He’s different.”

Even by 2016 standards, Trump is lapping the field in “Pants On Fires.”

“Tell you what: Look at Jeb Bush’s scorecard. Look at Marco Rubio’s scorecard. Anybody’s. If you’re a politician, and you’re talking about controversial things, odds are you’ll say something wacky at some point,” she said. “But they don’t look anything like Donald Trump’s.”

On a basic human level, too, Drobnic-Holan can see how this kind of thing goes uncovered by beat reporters and mainstream media. Journalists are tired. They can’t check everything right away when they’re on deadline. But writing a story about a controversy over a piece of misinformation one already knows is untrue, and not reporting it that way?

“If you’re repeating information that you know to be wrong without letting your readers know, then you’re doing them a disservice,” she said. “That’s the most vital service we provide, don’t you think? Is that controversial?”

It shouldn’t be, but it is.

The radio silence on Trump’s lies may have a direct and lasting effect on the country, too.

“These claims get repeated down ballot,” said Amazeen. “Governors, judges, dog catchers.”

So how can we stop it?

“We need to re-examine what our news media are doing. We need to find a way to get readers to value the content,” she said.

That means driving news outlets away from placing objectively true information next to feelings about what happened in an effort to shield themselves from the ridicule of one side. That ridicule, in the current economy of the Internet, could lead to a loss of unique visitors—the thing that matters most to advertisers on the Web. News companies, one way or another, need to keep the lights on.

A better way of monetizing the news is coming (like paid subscriptions), but until then candidates like Trump can revel in a mostly controversy-first, fact-second news cycle.

“Fact checking is spreading, but not nearly as fast as the misinformation before it. This is what journalists are supposed to be doing,” said Amazeen. “Journalism has been gutted over the years because it’s not making the money that it used to make. We’ve had a hollowing out of journalism.”

Drobnic-Holan sees a better future. She says her site is being cited more frequently this time around, that there’s a real appetite for it in the 2016 race.

“I really take seriously we’re independent, that we’re not taking sides, that we’re not making a judgment on the overall candidacy of a specific candidate, just their facts,” she said. “We’re trying to provide information for voters to inform the voters, then let the process play out.”

But shouldn’t everybody be doing that? Isn’t that just what journalism is? Isn’t fact checking the whole thing—not just the eighth paragraph underneath the controversy?

“I think so. I think people are starting to see how powerful this form of journalism is,” she says. “That if a journalist’s not fact checking, they’re not doing their jobs.”

Why Migration Should Be Central to Paris COP21 Climate Talks

By Harsha Walia, teleSUR

25 November 15

 

Climate refugees and displaced peoples bear the brunt of environmental violence.

e live in constant fear of the adverse impacts of climate change. For a coral atoll nation, sea level rise and more severe weather events loom as a growing threat to our entire population. The threat is real and serious, and is of no difference to a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.” - Prime Minister of Tuvalu Saufatu Sapo’aga at the United Nations.

In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, world leaders are closing their borders to refugees and cracking down on civil society participation in the upcoming climate negotiations. Over the past 15 years, the War on Terror has allowed for increased state powers while curbing fundamental rights, especially of racialized bodies marked as threats. Meanwhile, violence against the majority of humanity – including the devastation caused by climate change in places like Tuvalu – continues on with international impunity.

Tuvalu is one of dozens of low-lying Pacific Islands threatened with total submersion as catastrophic warming causes ocean levels to rise drastically. Over one-fifth of Tuvaluans have already been forced to flee and the government of Tuvalu has been urging the U.N. to heed the impending disaster in Tuvalu. Despite having the world’s highest emission per capita, Tuvalu’s neighbor, Australia, has so far refused to accept Tuvaluans as climate refugees.

It is evident that Australia and other Western governments’ non-response to climate change is reproduced in their denial of the humanity of those who are a product of our unequal world; millions of people are treated as expendable as the land, air and water that elites and their corporate friends are digging up and polluting.

There is no legal protection for #climatechange refugees. Here’s why this needs to change: https://t.co/MYCaXo6nHU via @onEarthMag

— NRDC (@NRDC) November 21, 2015

Climate Refugees at COP21 Climate Talks

Two years ago, the strongest storm ever recorded at landfall hit the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan left 6,000 people dead and 4 million people were forced from their homes. This month a coalition of survivors released an anniversary statement to the world:

“On the second anniversary of Yolanda, lighted candles may no longer be enough. We must organize an escalated action strengthening our broad networks to pressure our own inept governments and the world’s top 200 corporate giants amassing wealth from carbon pollution and social exploitation … Now is the time to end the climate crisis. Let the world know – our survival is non-negotiable.”

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes due to environmental disasters. This is the equivalent of one person displaced every second, and the likelihood of being displaced by a climate disaster is 60 percent higher today than it was four decades ago.

Even though international agencies and politicians routinely declare that climate and migration are two of the greatest crises on the planet today, a proposal to support climate refugees has been dropped from the U.N. COP21 climate talks in Paris. One of the key recommendations from the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility is to fund adaptation strategies that support communities to remain, as well as strategies to safely migrate through a climate change displacement coordination facility. Proposed by low-lying countries in the Global South, the recommendation is opposed by Western countries, especially Australia, and has now been entirely scrapped from the latest draft agreement.

It lays bare that to those in power the survival of brown and black bodies is, in fact, negotiable. Furthermore, carbon markets continue to be one of the primary solutions proposed by government and corporate elites, even though they open up impoverished communities to land grabs and further displacement by polluters.

Displacement as Environmental Violence

Climate refugees are not alone in bearing the impacts of environmental degradation. Refugees and migrants fleeing war, political violence and economic instability often tell the stories of livelihoods devastated by changing weather patterns or industrial development projects that permanently alter local landscapes. The staggering scale of the Syrian refugee crisis, for example, is compounded by an eight-year drought resulting in 75 percent of farmers suffering total crop failure and over 1.5 million people being forced into urban areas.

In fact, much of the political and imperialist violence that has caused the world’s largest mass displacements in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq can be traced back to the world’s largest climate crime of the tar sands.

Disproportionately impacting downstream Indigenous communities such as the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Beaver Lake Cree Nation and Lubicon Cree Nation at the source, over half of Alberta's tar sands go to the U.S. whose Department of Defense is the world's leading single buyer and consumer of oil. Indeed, the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 explicitly designates tar sands production to serve the fuel needs of the US military. As author Naomi Klein explains it, “As Baghdad burns, destabilizing the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms.” This is precisely why a local and global anti-colonial orientation needs to be central to climate justice movements.

The level of cognitive dissonance you need to believe refugees are the big threat in a world of climate change, inequality, debt, etc.

— RicharDawkins Trump (@umairh) November 22, 2015

In the East African country of Tanzania, mining for gold accounts for approximately 40 percent of the country’s exports. Just one mine, the North Mara gold mine owned by Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold, has displaced 10,000 families since 1997. Within one year, the Legal and Human Rights Center documented 19 murders of villagers opposing the mine by police and security forces. In another northern part of Tanzania, the Geita Gold Mine displaced 250 people from one village – almost all farming families who can no longer subsist on the land and have been living in a makeshift refugee camp for the past eight years. Industrial development such as mining, dams and power plants have severe consequences for the environment, as well as the human rights of those displaced due to loss of their lands and livelihoods. Researchers estimate that around the world 15 million people each year are forced to leave their homes due to industrial development projects, and that mining accounts for 10.3 percent of all development-induced displacements.

Furthermore, in a world of fortified borders, seeking refuge is underwritten by violence on the land. The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, for example, has created a 650-mile scar on the land as well as at least 5,000 migrant deaths in the past two decades. In 2005, a provision in the Real ID Act gave the Secretary of Homeland Security unprecedented power to waive 36 laws that protected endangered species, farmland, rivers and sensitive ecosystems. Meanwhile, prisons and immigration detention centers are massive environmental and health hazards for those disproportionately poor black and brown bodies warehoused behind bars and drinking water tainted with arsenic, sleeping in sewage, and breathing air from dangerously close power plants and landfills.

Freedom to move, stay and return

Climate change is a product of our political, social and economic system – one that places all that is sacred onto the market for pillage and profit, a hierarchal order that values some people as all of humanity while others are cast outside of humanity and made to disappear in the seas, on the streets and behind cages. This is precisely why displaced peoples must be central to climate movements.

As author McKenzie Wark reminds us, “Those who seek refuge, who are rarely accorded a voice, are nevertheless the bodies that confront the injustice of the world.”