The Mainstream news is fake news meme that President Trump has exercised himself to spread does raise a question: how to effectively refute it?
Oddly enough, one approach is by energetically exposing fake news within the mainstream media. WaPo has published just such a report, concerning a now-former star reporter for the German weekly Der Spiegel:
When an out-of-town journalist showed up in Fergus Falls, Minn., in February 2017, Michele Anderson couldn’t help but feel skeptical. Claas Relotius had been telling residents that he was writing about the state of rural America under President Trump. Anderson, a community arts administrator with progressive political views, was uncomfortable with “the anthropological gaze” that had been cast on communities like her own after the 2016 election. Hopefully, she would later recall thinking, an award-winning international journalist would at least manage to capture more nuance than the pundits had in the months following the election.
As it turned out, the piece that appeared in the respected German weekly magazine Der Spiegel a month later was even worse than she could have imagined. Not only did it rely on stock stereotypes of provincial, gun-toting conservatives, but many of the details were blatantly false.
At one time any self-respecting media outlet would fact-check their reporters, so ya gotta wonder what went wrong at Der Spiegel. But it sounds like Relotius had some panache and charisma working for him:
On Wednesday, [the concerned Fergus Falls residents] were vindicated. Der Spiegel announced that Relotius had “falsified his articles on a grand scale” since at least 2016 and had resigned after admitting that he had fabricated quotes and invented fictional details in more than a dozen stories, including his dispatch from Fergus Falls. The magazine’s investigation found that the 33-year-old writer had faked interviews with the parents of Colin Kaepernick and falsified material that appeared in award-winning features about children kidnapped by the Islamic State and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Before it all came crashing down, he had also managed to convince editors that a co-worker who expressed suspicions was the real liar.
Sounds like a current President of our experience, doesn’t he?
The real message here, though, is that the mainstream media self-corrected. It demonstrated not an allegiance to a political ideology, but to a far more important ideology, that being truth matters.
It’s not dispositive on its own, of course, but for conservatives sucked into the fake news meme, this sort of article should give them reason to pause and think again.
