The 2016 Election: How Fake News Became Real News
Both mainstream and fake news sources plagued the candidates’ campaigns
By Jackson Littlewood
The Progressive Teen Staff Writer
THE 2016 ELECTION ENDED IN A WAY that not many of us were expecting. As such, it seems appropriate to take a look back and examine exactly why Donal Trump won. There are certainly a multiplicity of factors; xenophobic rhetoric, the Democratic Party’s inability to connect to working class voters, etc. However, one of the biggest reasons why Donald Trump won is the influence of the media; when I say the media, I mean both real and fake news.
Fake News
THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING AS SATIRE, so I’m leaving sites like The Onion out of this category. Satire is intentionally trying to be preposterous to make a larger point about the media. Rather, fake news masquerades as real news and unfortunately confuses a high number of voters. I’m also leaving Fox News out of this first category. While they create a lot of misleading and/or biased news pieces, they’re slightly more credible than the news outlets I’m about to mention. So what makes a fake news site fake? Qualifying actions include constantly running misleading headlines (knowing that the reader will most likely only read the headline), a lack of diversity of thought, and finally, simply fabricating information.
So, what are some of the more influential fake news sites? Well, some of the most often shared sites on Facebook include Drudge Report, The Other 98%, RedState, and Infowars. These sites and more vary from a very far right wing position on the political spectrum to a far left wing position. However, probably the most influential of these outlets in the 2016 election was Breitbart. Breitbart is by no means a source that anyone should be citing information from.
Back in 2014, the site ran a story about President Obama’s new attorney general, Loretta Lynch. The article said that Lynch had been a part of Bill Clinton’s defense team in the Whitewater scandal. This is absolutely false. There was someone with the last name of Lynch on that team, but it was not Loretta Lynch. Breitbart eventually admitted they had made that mistake and fixed the article, but the fact that no one at Breitbart put a halt on running that article seems to show that journalism isn’t their primary goal.
More recently, former executive chair of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, was given a high-ranking position in Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He was also recently appointed to be Counselor to the President in the Trump Administration, a position that has been vacant since John Podesta left the office in 2015. Bannon’s political style perfectly fit the Trump campaign’s message of anger and dramatic change. Bannon attributed his site’s success to the very anger that made the Trump campaign so successful when he said, “…showing people that they can have a voice and you can channel that anger…You can take that anger…I think anger is a good thing. This country is in a crisis. And if you’re fighting to save this country, if you’re fighting to take this country back, it’s not going to be sunshine and patriots. It’s going to be people who want to fight.” This attitude was applied to Breitbart in its early days, it was applied to the Trump campaign, and it will be applied to Trump’s presidency in all likelihood.
Real News
FAKE NEWS WAS NOT THE ONLY WAY in which the media influenced this election. More credible news outlets also contributed to Trump’s victory in two ways: lack of coverage on important issues, and what the American people perceived as establishment bias.
Firstly, let’s examine establishment bias. There are two excellent examples of this. The first comes from The Washington Post. While they are undoubtedly a credible and legitimate news source, their establishment bias showed in March of 2016 when they ran 16 negative headlines in 16 hours against then presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Those headlines included, “Bernie Sanders pledges the U.S won’t be №1 in incarceration. He’ll need to release a lot of criminals”, to “Here’s something Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz have in common”. Those headlines are actually contradictory. One accused Sanders of being a crazy liberal who wanted to release criminals from prison while the other compared him to Ted Cruz, who is arguably more conservative than Donald Trump. And once again, it’s not a fair defense to say that the article itself was just. While that may be the case, a lot of viewers online don’t read the article; they only read the headline.
Another example of perceived establishment bias came from CNN in their primary election coverage. On June 6th, 2016, the night before the last set of primaries before the Democratic National Convention, CNN essentially called the primary election for Hillary Clinton. CNN’s delegate count found that after the most recent primaries, Clinton had secured 1,812 pledged delegates and 572 superdelegates, meaning that she had enough delegates to secure the nomination. The problem with that is that it did not mean she had clinched the nomination, because superdelegates are not bound and don’t vote until the convention. In fact, they very often switch their vote, like they did in 2008 in favor of Barack Obama. It would be perfectly fair to say that they are likely to vote one way or another, but it’s another thing to count them in their official delegate tally before they even voted. These biases by CNN and the Washington Post played a significant role in the protests of Clinton’s nomination at the DNC in July, and as a result, played a role in her declining poll numbers leading up to November’s election.
Another failure of the news media in this election was simply their lack of coverage of important issues, as well as lack of fact-checking for candidates. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage on Hillary Clinton was devoted to her scandals as opposed to the issues of her campaign. By election day, about 37% of news coverage on Clinton was scandal-related. It makes it much harder for almost any candidate to win when the issues of their campaign aren’t covered. In addition to that, Trump’s name was mentioned about twice as much as any other candidate in the entire election, according to TV News Archive. But the most important thing to mention is how little Trump was fact-checked by mainstream networks. Debate moderators and network hosts seemed to be relatively neutral when face-to-face with Trump. However, Politifact has found that about 70% of Trump’s statements are varying degrees of false. That fact should at least be mentioned by the mainstream networks, if not explained further.
Simply put, the media played a significant role in Donald Trump’s victory on November 8th. This election ought to be a reminder to the country how much the media matters in an election.
