Monday, December 10, 2018

Doubling Down on Doubling Down

Jay Rosen succinctly prescribes one solution to the bafflement of the mainstream press in dealing with Trump:
"Don't let him be your assignment editor." (At 2:30.)

If only the fact checker at the Washington Post was paying attention.

Trump doubles down on lies all the time. The constant lying is a way to deny reality, distract from the malfeasance of his team, deflect attention from important issues to unimportant or irrelevant matters, and to accuse a political opponent or the press, usually falsely or in a grossly misleading way of doing some wrong thing.  Unfortunately, if there is the slightest veracity or mere appearance of relevance to Trump's false claim, our mainstream press feels compelled to analyze the Trumpian statement in excruciating detail. By that point, Trump has succeeded in derailing the press from their mission by controlling the narrative, the constant drumbeat that he uses to keep his supporters agitated, aggravated, on edge, and fearful or hateful as the case may be.

Thus, fact checking of Trump by the press makes no sense as a reporting method because it gives Trump exactly what he wants, helping him to achieve the goals of his communications effort - satisfying supporters and confusing some opponents.

Early on, the press was mystified by Trump's doubling down on his lies. Surely fact checking would expose Trump as a fraud (but we can't call him a fraud, despite the preponderance of the evidence - we are a free press, after all, who must recoil from anything that smacks as an opinion, even when the verifiable conclusions are clear.)

So what does the WaPo do after all these years of fact checking have proved insufficient to derail Trump's false narratives? When Trump doubles down, they double down too -- on fact checking!

Wapo calls their latest invention the "Bottomless Pinnochio". When four Pinnochios are not enough.

From the WaPo fact checker ---"Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again"

How exactly does "bottomless Pinnocchio do anything that 5 or even 10 Pinnochios would not accomplish?

Any reader who is not convinced by four Pinnochios will not be convinced by a bottomless Pinocchio. And, by covering the lies in this manner, as statements that are considered with regard to their veracity instead of statements that Trump makes to deny, distract, deflect, and/or accuse, that is, statements that are made tactically, WaPo continues to fail to cover Trump responsibly ( or any politician who operates in bad faith) in the manner in which they deserve --- which is the coverage that the readership deserves.

See also: "Hothead But Not a Liar II - Tactics for Truth" for coverage of similar WaPo fact checking flaws and apt comments of  the linguist George Lakoff.
And for more about deny, distract, accuse and masterful narrative control, see:
Birtherism as a Service (BaaS)


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