Trump makes waves in a sea of fake news

One who fell in love with newspapers in his early teens can boast a long memory of journalistic trends. Never have they seemed so depressing.

As recently as 1997, when I filed my last column for the Washington Post syndicate, the future of print, though complicated by electronic trends, seemed unclouded. I was teaching then at Washington and Lee University, where Robert E. Lee had established the world’s first known chair of journalism – perhaps a gesture of thanksgiving for the publicity newspapers had given his miracles of generalship. Certainly his great adversaries, Grant and Sherman, hated reporters – so much that they danced a jig of celebration when it was reported (falsely, as it turned out) that a steamboat-load of journalists had blown up on the Mississippi. Lee was also aware that editors were often schooled in print shops and could use a touch of formal education.

My academic experience yielded a wealth of revealing incidents. At an end of term party one of my bright students asked: “Are you aware, sir, that when you mentioned television news you invariably called it ‘the so-called news’?” I was unaware but not surprised. Even with ornaments like Cronkite, Brinkley and Sevareid, all originally schooled in print, the 15- to 30-minute programs offered only superficial glimpses of a complex world. “So-called news” indeed.

In those latter days of print supremacy, few foresaw the chaos generated today by “social media,” which is so often anti-social in effect. Add a twittering president who regards newspapers as “enemies of the people” and applies epithets worthy of a banana-republic caudillo to his critics : “the failing New York Times” and “the lying Washington Post.” Donald Trump is so prolific a source of fables and fantasies that the Post counts them in the hundreds. You needn’t be deeply schooled in psychology to identify his epithets as the projections of his own ingrained hostility to truth.

So we are deep today into a layered world. Sophisticated print publications convey something of the real world to their readers. But many of the iPhone generation move in a fog of digital shadows where misinformation abounds, thickened by lies and propaganda – “fake news” indeed.

Tune in to almost any news channel of cable TV at any hour of day or night and you are likely to find the chattering classes in full tongue, chasing leaks and rumors and their possible damage to Donald Trump and his mischief – recently the surprising claim of his lawyers that presidents are above the law. Indeed Richard Nixon occasionally claimed that immunity to law before he was ousted in the Watergate scandal, an unsavory precedent.

That story seems to have grown dim in memory.

The famous negative example in modern history of unapologetic autocracy was that of Louis XIV of France, who boasted “L’etat, c’est moi”: “I am the state.” But that was centuries ago in the dynastic and monarchical age, and this is the republican United States in 2017: a bit late for absolutist claims.

Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor who finished the job, clearly had his doubts about the pre-impeachment criminal liability of Richard Nixon. He hedged his doubts by naming Nixon an “unindicted co-conspirator.” This label did not absolve Nixon of criminal liability, as his later pardon by President Ford plainly indicated – if there was none, what was the point of a pardon? Jaworski’s was a respectful nod to the ambiguity of the Constitution’s impeachment article. It clearly states that impeachment and removal from office do not absolve an ousted president of criminal liability, but it is unclear about the proper sequence – indicating, indeed, that criminal liability takes a backseat to civil and political misdemeanors, high and low. Hence the inventive term, “unindicted (not unindictable) co-conspirator.”

Jaworski’s apparently forgotten example is full of implications for Trump, assuming that his daily debasement of presidential dignity and responsibility has impeachable aspects. Again, the constitutional view is that presidential unfitness is primarily civil and political. Thus the underinformed chatter of TV’s chattering classes misses a vital mark.

Still, the supreme irony is that the most eminent purveyor of disinformation, or what he calls “fake news” is that compulsive twitterer, Donald Trump, who daily, sometimes hourly, undermines the integrity of the republic and of his great office.

This story was originally published December 9, 2017 at 11:00 AM with the headline "Trump makes waves in a sea of fake news."