4

Fake News and Perspective Unmoored

There’s a pattern to this book. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 all explore the same phenomenon, but on different scales and with different polarities (some look at positive examples, while some look at negative).

Chapter 1 argues that all communication is translation because words never mean exactly the same thing twice. That is, a word evokes something different for listeners from one use to the next, if only because when I use a word and you, in your response, use it too, you have to account not only for your use of the word, but also for mine (which I didn’t need to do). We can make use of this semiotic gap to perform acts of cultural translation and, if we’re strategic, help people see the world from a new perspective, making it a tool against the oppression of others. Chapter 2 presents the flip-side of chapter 1. It is concerned with ways cultural translation can stop people from seeing the world from any perspective at all. People can exploit the gap between uses of a word to cut others off from their own interpretation of the world, thus depriving them of the tools they need to make their own decisions. This is what O’Brien does to Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Chapter 3 makes the same argument as chapter 1, but on a micro-scale. It looks at tactics people can use to change others’ minds by changing their initial interpretive frame. It highlights an approach taken by performance artist Petr Pavlenskii, who implicates the people he’s talking to in the argument he’s making. The shock people experience in recognizing themselves in his argument prompts them to see the world anew, as if through a parallax view: the objects they’re looking at don’t move, but they as observers do, causing them to see the objects in a new configuration.

Chapter 4, which is about fake news, follows this pattern. Like chapter 2, it is about perspective unmoored, in ways similar to what we saw in Nineteen Eighty-Four: after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, the idea of fake news in a “post-truth” society reminded so many people of Orwell’s book that it became a surprise best-seller.¹ Like chapter 3, it is about tactics, in ways similar to what we saw in Pavlenskii’s art: the act of implicating people in an argument can cause them to reject new perspectives just as easily as adopt them.

Fake news is a complex topic, which this chapter explores by placing debates about it in two contexts: first, ideas of objectivity in journalism, philosophy, and science, and, second, past controversies about the status of facts in reporting. It then examines the tactics used by President Trump to tether the phrase fake news to a new set of ideas. The central question is this: how has the term fake news evolved? Its meaning—as previous chapters would lead us to expect—has not remained stable from one use to the next. In the years leading up to the 2016 election, it usually referred to fake news programs, such as those that aired on the U.S. cable network Comedy Central. Immediately after the election, journalists from broad-circulation outlets such as the New York Times talked about fake news as stories that were false. Trump (not to mention authoritarian leaders around the world) then co-opted the term, stripping it of its critical edge by applying it to stories he found troublesome.² What’s striking about the shift is the degree to which Trump’s use of the term has caused a collective sense of crisis among journalists. What tactics has Trump used, and why did they generate this sense of crisis? In short, how did this change in meaning take place, and what made it stick?

What Is Objectivity?

Perhaps it goes without saying, but to function as informed citizens in a democracy, we need to know what’s going on in the world around us. We need to talk with others to identify problems and explore possible solutions. We need to argue, and ideally we do so with some belief in the notion that we can trust that what we think is true is in fact true. We want to be sure we’re making the right choices or advocating for the best course of action.³

But we can’t know the world merely as it is. We know it through our senses, first of all, which act as mediators between us and the things we experience. We have no independent way to verify that what our senses tell us is true—to do so, we’d have to gather information about the world yet again through the mediation of our senses. In other words, we have no choice but to rely on our senses, which might deceive us.

There’s also a lot of world that we’ll never personally experience. I’ve lived quite a few places (in eleven cities in three countries on two continents), and I speak two languages. Many people have seen much more than I have. But none of us, not even the most experienced world-travellers, will ever see any more than a miniscule percentage of what’s out there. So we must rely on the accounts of others, many of whom we’ll meet only through TV or the internet. We must trust them if we are to have any confidence in what they show us.

Here is where the idea of objectivity comes into play. In a philosophical sense, objectivity is the capacity to describe the world as it is, rather than how we perceive it to be. We achieve objectivity to the degree that we remove our own subjective perspective from the process of observation. In other words, an observation is objective if it’s true regardless of who makes it. This task, of course, is paradoxical: we’re trying to use our senses to overcome the limits imposed by our senses, as they mediate our contact with the world.⁴

Journalists have a different (but related) sense of objectivity. For them, it’s a way to compensate for the perspective they bring to the events they describe. Journalists are constantly making choices about what makes an event newsworthy, or even what events constitute “news” in the first place. They write about some aspects of an event but not others, decisions that come from their personal and professional experience, which is in turn shaped by a history of social and economic pressures shaping the news industry. Although we might take ideas of objectivity for granted now, it’s important to understand that they developed in specific places at specific times, namely the English-speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are not universally shared or applied, as journalists in different places and traditions have differing priorities and habits. In fact, we can understand the skepticism many people now express about journalists’ motivations and the veracity of their reporting by taking a closer look at this history.

Sociologist Jean Chalaby describes the development of professional notions of objectivity as part of a shift that English-language journalism underwent between the 1830s and the 1920s.⁵ This shift came about because of reporters’ access to new technologies and their development of new journalistic techniques. In the first case, the telegraph made it possible for them to write about things happening too far away to see in person. No longer did communication involve the movement of people (they didn’t have to travel to where events took place) or of physical media such as written documents (they didn’t have to rely on trains or other modes of transport to deliver accounts of faraway events).⁶ In the second case, American journalists began to organize their reports around “fact-centred discursive practices.”⁷ One of their new tools was the interview, which became common practice in the 1860s.⁸

The shift that led to contemporary notions of objectivity related most importantly to the way newspapers were funded. Before the 1830s, newspapers were dependent on political parties and on the government for their funding. As printing technologies developed (for instance, with the introduction of steam-powered rotary presses in the mid-nineteenth century), the cost of production fell. Publishers could produce more copies and sell them for less. Their increased reach made them attractive to advertisers, who provided money to replace the revenue they had received from political parties. Advertisers wanted to reach the largest audience possible. In order not to alienate readers, reporters adopted a more politically neutral approach. This neutrality, borne of newspapers’ increasing economic autonomy, came to define how journalists understood their professional obligations. Objectivity came to mean “political neutrality.”⁹

The ways journalists put these ideas into practice were also shaped by social and economic factors. In the 1970s, sociologist Gaye Tuchman spent time in the northeastern United States among reporters going about their work. She observed that they treated objectivity as a way to mitigate risk. Specifically, they worried that they could be held legally accountable (through libel laws) if they wrote something false. To avoid that possibility, they adopted a set of professional practices meant to deflect accusations of bias. For instance, they presented conflicting explanations of events (that is, they covered “both” sides of a story). They also sought out and presented evidence that supported the assertions they made. When they wrote something controversial, they made “judicious” use of quotation marks (that is, they quoted someone making a controversial statement, rather than making it themselves). Finally, they structured their information in a conventional sequence, with the most important facts first, then the explanations of those facts later.¹⁰ (This is the “inverted pyramid” approach, which grew out of the emphasis on facts Chalaby observed in the professional practices that developed in the nineteenth century.)

What this brief history reveals is one of the sources for people’s current skepticism about journalists and their intentions. If objectivity in a philosophical sense is an illusion, and if objectivity in a journalistic sense is merely a practice, why shouldn’t we be skeptical about how journalists pursue their work? We as news consumers are savvy about the social and economic factors that shape what journalists do. Politics in North American and European democracies have grown increasingly polarized, and it’s not hard to find bias against our point of view, whichever it is, in different outlets. No one will deny that the world depicted by Fox News is not the same as the one depicted by National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or the New York Times. So what’s to say that the stories journalists present are in any way true?

Fake News: A Brief History

The multiplicity of different viewpoints to which people were exposed with the arrival of the internet, cable news, and social media, among other things, meant that habits journalists had long adopted under the label of objectivity no longer served to generate the trust they had in the 1970s. In other words, in the time leading up to and immediately following the 2016 U.S. election, Americans were ripe for the idea of fake news. They didn’t trust journalists. More than half thought that the news media were biased, regardless of their political affiliation. More than three-quarters of Republicans didn’t trust the media, conservative Republicans being the least likely of all to trust them. Democrats tended to trust them more, but not by much. The more they diverged from the centre, the less trustful they were (figure 26).¹¹

If people distrusted the news media, they distrusted social media—where many false stories circulated—even more. Only 4 percent of “web-using U.S. adults” said they trusted information they got from social media “a lot,” while another 30 percent said they trusted it “some.”¹² This immense distrust translated into a situation where many people “[saw] fake news as different from poor journalism primarily by degree.”¹³ The habits journalists had long adopted under the label of objectivity no longer served to generate the trust they had in the 1970s.

Add to this the active efforts that professional internet trolls were making to spread disinformation, and the mix is potent. The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the best-known organization, employing “hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters.” It has been responsible for “highly coordinated disinformation campaign[s], involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting [lists] of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention.”¹⁴ Its activities have been well covered in the U.S. press, giving Americans even more reason to be skeptical about the news they read or see.

To be sure, the phenomenon of made-up stories is not new. Michael Schudson and Barbie Zelizer cite examples as far back as “anti-Semitic blood libel stories in 15th century Europe to church-supported missives of divine retribution following the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.”¹⁵ They also quote Thomas Jefferson, who lamented in 1807 that “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”¹⁶

The phrase fake news also shows up in greater and lesser frequency over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as this n-gram shows (figure 27). (An n-gram measures how often a word or phrase appears in a given corpus, or collection of texts. In this case, the corpus is all the books digitized by Google.)¹⁷

There are a number of peaks and valleys. One peak comes during the First World War, and another, steeper peak, during the Second World War. A third, subtler peak is observable in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Cold War. All three are indices of the concerns people in the English-speaking world had about propaganda (during the world wars) or Soviet dezinformatsiya (during the Cold War).¹⁸

The last peak, beginning in about 2000, reflects a different concern. As the cable industry in the United States became more competitive, with an ever-increasing number of channels dividing viewers into ever-smaller groups, networks had to find ways to distinguish themselves from their competitors. One network, Comedy Central, did so by creating satirical news programs such as The Daily Show, which began to air in 1996. Jon Stewart became the host in 1999, right before the contested presidential election of 2000, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the tumultuous presidency of George W. Bush. With Stewart as host, The Daily Show attracted many viewers, especially from younger demographics that were less likely to watch conventional news. It also produced spin-off shows such as The Colbert Report, a parody of conservative talk shows. Scholars, journalists, and other professional opinion-makers either worried about or celebrated the trend, especially as studies began to show that these programs could increase engagement among younger voters.¹⁹

Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, interest in fake news—returning here to the older sense of “made up news”—has risen again. Figure 28 shows the search trends for the phrase “fake news” on Google from January 1, 2016, to July 16, 2018. (It shows the frequency of searches, broken down by week, as compared to the week when “fake news” was most searched. It reports the number of searches as a percentage of that peak.)

Before November 2016, the month of the election, the rate of searches was relatively flat. The rate of searches picked up immediately after the election, peaking right after the inauguration during the week of January 8, 2017, with sustained but slowly declining interest for the next six months. It peaked again about a year later, during the week of January 14, 2018, when Trump made a show of awarding the “Fake News Awards.”²⁰

People’s concerns about fake news have changed, especially since 2016. It became clear during the election that the technological environment, especially with social media, had changed dramatically even in comparison to the 2008 or 2012 elections. Technology has lowered the cost of production and allowed a wider range of media-producers to enter the market. Consequently, the conditions Tuchman described in the 1970s are no longer present. The journalists she described upheld practices of objectivity in part out of a sense of professionalism, but also in part out of fear of losing readers to their competitors. When the costs of entry were high, markets were limited, and if one organization lost a reader (for instance, if its reporters acted unprofessionally), its competitors likely gained a reader. Now the logic of competition is different: new competitors gain readers by rejecting the norms of the past in favour of provocation, thus “undermin[ing] the business models of traditional news sources that had enjoyed high levels of public trust and credibility.”²¹

Social media have also played an important role in changing how people find and consume news. In 2016, about 40 percent of U.S. adults often got news online (through social media and other websites), while about 60 percent got it from TV. Younger people (between the ages of 18 and 29) were more than twice as likely than older people (above age 65) to get their news online (50 percent versus 20 percent).²² Bots, or automated fake accounts, amplified the effects of sharing: “By one recent estimate—that classified accounts based on observable features such as sharing behavior, number of ties, and linguistic features—between 9 and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots.”²³ The effect on the circulation of fake news has been dramatic. Research published in Science found, “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”²⁴

What does this brief history tell us about fake news? It helps us see that it’s not one thing. The term is polysemic (that is, it has many competing meanings—polysemy comes from the Greek πολυ, or poly, “many” and σῆμα, or sêma, “sign”). Its meaning is contested, and some meanings that were once prominent (such as the reference to comedy news shows from the early 2000s) have lost their currency. In the context of the United States immediately after 2016, the meanings related to misinformation were the most important politically.²⁵

But something has happened in the time since then:

This phrase has been irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate. As politicians have implemented a political strategy of labeling news sources that do not support their positions as unreliable or fake news, whereas sources that support their positions are labeled reliable or not fake, the term has lost all connection to the actual veracity of the information presented, rendering it meaningless for use in academic classification.²⁶

In other words, fake news has long been a feature of what we would now call the media environment. What makes it different now, according to Michael Schudson and Barbie Zelizer, is the anxiety it has produced about the professionalization of journalism, accompanied by a growing recognition among members of the public, as well as scholars and journalists, of the challenges of objectivity. Finally, what makes it different is also its propagation by politicians across the globe, especially the president of the United States.²⁷

So how do we understand the shift in ideas evoked by the term, and, more to the point, the strategies employed by President Trump to bring about that shift?

Gaslighting

The same tools we developed in chapter 3 are useful here, in particular the idea of frames as elements of logical syllogisms (or fully developed signs, in Peirce’s terms), which we used to explain how one person could prompt another to see the world from a new perspective. Here we will use frames too, but to look at an inverse case. They will help us identify one strategy Trump has used to make people doubt news sources that, in the past, employed the techniques identified by Tuchman and Chalaby to demonstrate their objectivity, or at least their neutrality. This doubt has played a key role in bringing about the shift in meaning of fake news that has alarmed journalists because of the way it has caused some readers’ perspective to become unmoored.

Of course, Trump has used more than just one strategy. For one thing, he often simply makes bald assertions that journalists for outlets such CNN and the New York Times are peddling lies: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he told a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Affairs in Missouri in July 2018. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”²⁸ His supporters have turned “fake news” into a chant they repeat at rallies. But one specific strategy interests us here: his technique, broadly speaking, of gaslighting (or denying things his listeners know to be true), or, narrowly speaking, of manufacturing situations where journalists he dislikes appear to contradict themselves.

Commentators across the political spectrum have noted Trump’s habit of saying something and then denying it later. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the website Politifact catalogued “17 times Donald Trump said one thing and then denied it,” including a claim he made—and then later forgot—about having one of the best memories in the world.²⁹ A staffer for Ted Cruz, Trump’s principal rival for the Republican nomination in 2016, identified a pattern in Trump’s approach. First, he makes a claim that people, especially in the media, are unlikely to accept, in order to create a “media frenzy.” Second, he asks what other people are saying, as a way to attribute responsibility to someone else for saying controversial things. Third, he promises to produce evidence that will “get to the truth of the matter.” Fourth, he attacks the character of his detractors and opponents. Fifth, and finally, he simply declares victory when he’s ready to move on to a different topic.³⁰

Rhetorical scholar Jennifer Mercieca gives a name to this approach. She identifies it as paralipsis (παράλειψις, from para, “beside” and leipein, “to leave”), a “device that enables [Trump] to publicly say things that he can later disavow—without ever having to take responsibility for his words.”³¹ It consists in quoting someone else, but then denying any responsibility for the claim that person is making. It gives Trump plausible deniability when he talks about controversial ideas: he can claim the ideas aren’t his and he’s only quoting someone else. Twitter is an especially apt platform for this approach, given the ease of retweeting someone else’s post: “Trump can argue that he can’t be held accountable because he wasn’t the one who originally posted the tweet. He can shrug and claim that he’s simply giving a voice to an idea.”³² He can benefit from the support of white supremacists, for example, by retweeting their posts, but he can also claim ignorance of their views when pressed by reporters.

The “Animals” Coming into the Country

This technique, in particular as it involves putting journalists in a position where they appear to violate their own professional norms, is clear in a series of events that followed a controversial statement Trump made in May 2018. He was in California to talk about sanctuary cities, whose police officers limit their co-operation with federal officers who enforce immigration laws. They do so out of a concern to provide services to everyone, even those whose precarious immigration status might dissuade them from approaching the police for help. In that context, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims raised concerns about the gang MS-13, which originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s and grew in strength in Honduras and El Salvador when its members were deported. Trump had frequently referred to the gang’s excessive violence to justify his hardline stance on immigration. Mims wanted to talk about the limits she faced because of California’s sanctuary laws.

The exchange was controversial because of Trump’s response to Mims when she said that she couldn’t contact ICE (the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in certain circumstances, even if an MS-13 member were involved:

SHERIFF MIMS: There could be an MS-13 member I know about—if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.

THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in—and we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.³³

Journalists, along with other public officials (and especially Democratic politicians), objected to the term animals, which they thought Trump had applied broadly to immigrants coming into the United States. Trump and his defenders countered that animals referred narrowly to MS-13 members.

What mattered for both was what Trump meant by “people coming into the country.” The two camps used different interpretive frames, with corresponding syllogisms, to make sense of his comments. The New York Times (on which I will focus here because it has been one of Trump’s biggest critics and one of his most frequent targets) interpreted the comments within a historical frame, where Trump’s past comments about immigrants, especially during the 2016 campaign, shaped how people understood his use of the word animals. Trump’s administration, in contrast, interpreted his comments within a security frame, which was concerned more narrowly with a subset of immigrants, namely those who belonged to gangs.

The first article published by the New York Times opened by saying, “President Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting on Wednesday, warning in front of news cameras that dangerous people were clamoring to breach the country’s borders and branding such people ‘animals.’” In the next paragraph, it made the historical frame clear by explaining, “It was hardly the first time the president has spoken in racially fraught terms about immigrants.”³⁴ Indeed, Trump declared in the speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”³⁵ During his campaign, he had promised to strengthen immigration laws and even build a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border.

The chain of interpretants suggested by this article (as well as articles that followed the next day) is illustrated in figure 29.³⁶

The initial sign (the word animals), as interpreted through the frame of recent history, evokes immigrants in a broad sense. That association in turn evokes a more complex sign, a syllogism according to which Trump has appealed to nativist tendencies in the past by making disparaging remarks about immigrants (major premise), and about whom he is making disparaging comments now (minor premise). Therefore he must be using the word animals in a broad sense, to appeal to the same nativist tendencies as before (conclusion). The idea that he is describing more than just MS-13 (as he would claim the next day) is suggested by the broader context of the roundtable, which was about sanctuary cities, where the threat of gangs was merely an example used to support Mims’s claims. In fact, Linda Qiu, responding to Trump’s supporters two days after the exchange, explained that Mims’s complaints were true only of immigrants—whether gang members or not—who had not committed violent crimes. As soon as they committed a violent crime, they were no longer eligible for protection under sanctuary city laws.³⁷ The idea that Trump was referring only to violent MS-13 members was logically inconsistent: the limits Mims faced, to which Trump was responding, did not apply to MS-13.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, interpreted the “animal” comments through a different lens, that of security. The day after the roundtable, Trump sought to clarify his meaning, placing his comments in the context of the immediate exchange with Mims, rather than the roundtable itself: “I’m referring, and you know I’m referring, to the MS-13 gangs that are coming in. We have laws that are laughed at on immigration. So when the MS-13 comes in, when the other gang members come into our country, I refer to them as animals.”³⁸ The word animals, he contended, referred only to MS-13 gang members, with the resulting syllogism looking like figure 30:

People who committed violent crimes were animals (major premise), and MS-13 members committed such crimes (minor premise). Therefore they—but not immigrants who were not violent—were animals (conclusion) comes from the Greek . On May 18, Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made a similar point by describing violent acts committed by MS-13:

It took an animal to stab a man a hundred times and decapitate him and rip his heart out. It took an animal to beat a woman—they were sex trafficking—with a bat 28 times, indenting part of her body. And it took an animal to kidnap, drug and rape a 14-year-old Houston girl.³⁹

The point here is not to determine who was right or wrong. Partisans at all points along the political spectrum were subject to the paradox we identified at the beginning of chapter 3: their worldview influenced what they saw as salient, and what they saw as salient influenced their worldview. That is, their symbolic world remained relatively closed. They understood events in such a way that certain aspects of context appeared salient, influencing, for instance, whether they took a broad or narrow view of the exchange between Mims and Trump, or whether they interpreted Trump’s use of the word animals through the frame of history or security. The context they picked out then shaped how they understood what Trump meant. Each interpretive choice worked in this loop to confirm their pre-existing symbolic logic. For instance, those who interpreted Trump’s comments through a security frame gave more weight to his mentions of violence, which led them to see MS-13 members as “animals” and reinforced the idea that the salient features of recent events involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were the acts of violence (figure 31). Those who interpreted Trump’s comments through a history frame, on the other hand, gave more weight to his history of nativist statements, which led them to see similar ideas now and reinforced the idea that the salient features of recent events related to his nativist appeals (figure 32). For this reason, any judgement we might make about who was right would fall along partisan lines because we, too, attribute more importance to certain aspects of context than others, an inescapably partisan choice.

What matters instead is the strategy Trump used to implicate journalists in producing what he could point to as fake news. On May 18, he posted a tweet that made it look as though the New York Times, along with other outlets, had deliberately misrepresented his meaning:

Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, “Animals.” Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,” a big difference—and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!⁴⁰

He was shifting blame and putting journalists on the defensive in such a way that the label fake news seemed all the more applicable.

At least one columnist at the New York Times agreed. Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist and frequent critic of Donald Trump, thought the coverage by his newspaper and others played into Trump’s hands by supporting the story he wanted to tell about journalists. He pointed out retractions or clarifications made by the Associated Press and by Democratic politicians once the security frame became dominant (he did not acknowledge the plausibility of the history frame). “The president’s apologists,” he said, “can now point to a genuine instance of fake news—not merely factually mistaken, but wilfully misleading—in order to dismiss the great bulk of negative reporting that isn’t fake.”⁴¹

Stephens’s column highlighted the impact of doubt on perspective. For Trump’s supporters, the strategy of implicating journalists had the effect of casting them in a partisan light, undermining any claims they might make to neutrality and supporting (or appearing to support) Trump’s claims that the news they produced was false. In this way, it strengthened associations with the security frame (figure 31) and weakened associations with the history frame (figure 32). Doubt became a tool for shifting the meaning of fake news so it was no longer a word used by journalists to describe made-up stories (as it was briefly after the 2016 election) but instead was a word used by people in positions of political power to describe stories they found troublesome.

Conclusion: Perspective Unmoored

Although we can’t generalize from this one example, we can find others like it. In June 2018, for instance, journalist Liz Plank observed something similar in the controversy provoked by First Lady Melania Trump when she wore a jacket with the message “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” as she boarded a plane to visit an immigrant detention centre in Texas. Journalists criticized the message while spokespeople for the First Lady objected that it was only a jacket—something trivial and not worth the attention. Plank saw the jacket as bait that other journalists took, arguing that the decision to wear it

creates a circus where . . . networks like Fox News can roll the clips and tweets from reporters being critical of [the First Lady’s] choice of clothing to confirm to their viewers that the media cannot be trusted and that they don’t focus on what the American people really care about.⁴²

In other words, journalists acted out a script written by members of the Trump administration, which strengthened the idea that major news organizations were purveyors of fake news.

The proliferation of the term fake news has a broad range of implications, especially for the functioning of democracy in the United States and abroad, that others have addressed more effectively than I can here.⁴³ This analysis of the strategies Trump has used to shift the sense of the term does lead us to one useful conclusion, however. Carried to its logical extreme, the unmooring of perspective brought about by this shift encourages the growth of conspiracy theories grounded in a solipsism that follows a logic we saw in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People who believe these theories can explain away any evidence that would disprove them by arguing that it is really just manufactured by members of the conspiracy. Evidence produced by “fake news” outlets is no evidence at all because the source is not trustworthy.

The danger posed by this shift has increased as Trump and others have replaced the phrase fake news with the phrase enemy of the people. Trump himself has observed this change, as he wrote in a tweet in July 2018:

Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A. G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!⁴⁴

Journalists worry that such rhetoric will lead to violence against them.⁴⁵

Where does this analysis of the phrase fake news—along with that of Petr Pavlenskii and Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Encoding/Decoding”—leave us? We’ve explored the utopian and dystopian dimensions of cultural translation as a mode of substituting signs and changing people’s perspectives. What are the implications for us as students and teachers living in the twenty-first century?

1 Michiko Kakutani, “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read.”

2 In a tweet from May 2018, Trump made the link between “fakeness” and negative coverage clear: “Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake).” Quoted in Tamara Keith, “President Trump’s Description of What’s ‘Fake’ Is Expanding.”

3 Or so I stubbornly believe. I became a teacher based on this stubborn belief. Call me naïve if you will, but this is a fight I refuse to give up.

4 The philosophical approach that addresses this paradox head on is phenomenology. It consists in asking how we experience the world, rather than what the world is. Edmund Husserl, for instance, takes as his object of investigation not the thing he perceives—a person standing in front of him, for instance—but instead his experience of perception itself. See Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. For a more contemporary account addressed to twenty-first century readers, see Samuel D. Rocha, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person.

5 Jean Chalaby, “Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention: A Comparison of the Development of French and Anglo-American Journalism, 1830s–1920s.”

6 With respect to the role of the telegraph in changing how people related to space and distance, see James Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.”

7 Chalaby, “Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention,” 310.

8 Ibid., 312.

9 Ibid., 320. Of course, this reliance made a different type of influence possible: advertisers can also shape content, a fact that has become especially clear since the 1990s, when cable news networks, with the support of their advertisers, carved out new audiences by catering to specific political views.

10 Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.”

11 Amy Mitchell et al., The Modern News Consumer: News Attitudes and Practices in the Digital Era, 9.

12 Ibid., 7. See also Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “People Don’t Trust News Media—and This Is Key to the Global Misinformation Debate,” 14–15.

13 Fletcher and Nielsen, “People Don’t Trust News Media,” 15.

14 Adrian Chen, “The Agency.”

15 Michael Schudson and Barbie Zelizer, “Fake News in Context,” 1.

16 Ibid.

17 Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.”

18 Schudson and Zelizer, “Fake News in Context,” 2.

19 See, for example, Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth”; and Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement.

20 See Jon Greenberg, Louis Jacobson, and Manuela Tobias, “Fact-Checking Donald Trump’s Fake News Awards.”

21 David M. J. Lazer et al., “The Science of Fake News,” 1094.

22 Mitchell et al., Modern News Consumer, 5.

23 Lazer et al., “Science of Fake News,” 1095.

24 Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” 1146.

25 Scholars have even broken down fake news into different types, depending on the degree to which authors mean to mislead, or the effects they hope to achieve. See Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, “Information Disorder: Definitions.”

26 Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral, “Spread of True and False News Online,” 1146.

27 Schudson and Zelizer, “Fake News in Context,” 3.

28 Quoted in Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman, “Spotting CNN on a TV Aboard Air Force One, Trump Rages Against Reality.”

29 Linda Qiu, “17 Times Donald Trump Said One Thing and Then Denied It.”

30 Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us, 15.

31 Jennifer Mercieca, “There’s an Insidious Strategy Behind Donald Trump’s Retweets.”

32 Ibid.

33 “Remarks by President Trump at a California Sanctuary State Roundtable.” Also quoted in Linda Qiu, “The Context Behind Trump’s ‘Animals’ Comment.”

34 Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Calls Some Unauthorized Immigrants ‘Animals’ in Rant.”

35 Donald Trump, “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech.”

36 The New York Times brought up the history frame again in an editorial about the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents, which it viewed as following logically from Trump’s other expressions of animosity toward immigrants, going back to the early days of his campaign. See New York Times Editorial Board, “The Cruelty of Breaking Up Immigrant Families.”

37 Qiu, “Context Behind Trump’s ‘Animals’ Comment.”

38 Quoted in Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Defends ‘Animals’ Remark, Saying It Referred to MS-13 Gang Members.”

39 Quoted in Qiu, “Context Behind Trump’s ‘Animals’ Comment.”

40 From the Twitter account of @realDonaldTrump, May 18, 2018, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/997429518867591170.

41 Bret Stephens, “Trump, MS-13, and Fake News.”

42 Amira Rasool, “Journalist Liz Plank Believes the Media Was Baited by Melania Trump’s Zara Jacket.”

43 See, for instance, New York Times Editorial Board, “A Free Press Needs You” and “The True Damage of Trump’s ‘Fake News’”; and Michelle Goldberg, “The Autocrats’ Playbook.”

44 From the Twitter account of @realDonaldTrump, July 29, 2018, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1023546197129224192.

45 See, for example, Bret Stephens, “Trump Will Have Blood on His Hands”; and Scott Simon, “Opinion: Calling the Press the Enemy of the People Is a Menacing Move.”