WaPo Opened the Door for Alternative Facts
It wasn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart, mainstream press needs to take the blame, too
In a recent “Meet the Press” interview, Kelleyanne Conway’s assertion that “alternative facts” can be used in a presidential press conference not only set Chuck Todd on fire, but also hordes of people running for the nearest copy of George Orwell’s 1984. The dystopian novel about a totalitarian state that asks its citizens to believe blatant untruths such as
“2 + 2 = 5” hit #1 on Amazon’s best seller list on January 24th after Conway’s comments. (You can find a free copy of 1984 here)
Then, two weeks after her discussion with Todd, Conway was under fire from the press again for purporting that two Iraqi immigrants were the “masterminds behind the Bowling Green Massacre,” an incident that never happened. Referring to the event, she said, “there was very little coverage — I bet it’s brand new information to people.” It was ‘brand new’ because it was false. Thankfully, Conway has since been forced to retract her statement.
And You May Ask Yourself…How Did I Get Here?
While the mainstream media correctly rebukes the idea of “alternative facts,” there isn’t much discussion about how we arrived at a point in time where someone could try to pawn off such an absurd notion so non-chalantly. If there were an undeniable record of journalistic integrity in our press, would this even be a plausible strategy for a new White House administration?
The drift of alternative facts from the periphery of our political discourse to its center is not a random occurrence. Charles Sykes recently wrote that both his and others’ radio broadcasts intentionally tried to condition their listeners to distrust any media source that wasn’t in their “conservative media ecosystem.”
But conservatives aren’t alone in their increasing distrust of mass media. An annual gallup poll shows a fading trust in the press by democrats and independents from a decade ago. Additionally, the poll shows that Millennials and Gen-Xers, who are typically thought of as the more progressive generations, report lower levels of trust in the media than their older counterparts.
So while it is true that far-right commentators have been attacking the mainstream media for decades, that fact alone doesn’t wholly explain a loss of trust across the board.
It is not merely from partisan bias that a person starts to lose faith in the media. When one discovers that sources they once thought of as reliable are no longer so, trust is broken. Factual errors, presented as truth, have undermined the very institution designed to act as the fourth check and balance on government power.
The media’s own lack of integrity opened the door for our new administration to present factual-relativism as a viable philosophy.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
As a sort of case-study, I’ve compiled a list of notable factual errors the Washington Post published this past year. These are articles that other writers and publications have already taken issue with. It is important to note that just because WaPo published wrong facts in these instances, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their other published information is incorrect. And likewise, this is not an exhaustive list; there may be other instances I haven’t come across. The intent is to review some notable errors, things that could possibly change one’s mind about an issue or rewrite a narrative. So, if you haven’t used up your 5 free WaPo articles this month, let’s get to it!
“Support of TARP on the Campaign Trail Should Be An Asset, Not a Liability” — January 28, 2016
The WaPo editorial board (not a singular op-ed, but the entire editorial board) wrote a piece on politicians’ stances on TARP, praising those who supported it and decrying those who were critical of it. In the piece, they stated that “Wall Street banks and bankers still took losses and suffered upheaval, despite the bailout.” However, as Thomas Frank pointed out, many experts prior to this printing provided evidence that Wall St. banks are now bigger than before the bailout and calculate Wall St. Banks are due $16.8 Trillion through TARP when all’s said and done. That is not exactly ‘suffering.’
The piece also stated that “TARP helped limit the collateral damage that Main Street suffered” which contradicts the fact that hundreds of Main St. Banks went into bankruptcy from 2008–2010 and that TARP funds largely failed to reach the most affected homeowners. It is entirely erroneous to say that TARP’s effects left Wall St. hurting while protecting Main St.
It should be noted that this piece then slams politicians, including Bernie Sanders, for being vocal critics of the TARP implementation. At the end of the article, in reference to TARP’s effects, they state, “That is the truth, and we can’t think of a sorrier comment on American politics than the fact that so many candidates have an interest in pretending otherwise.” Just because one writes ‘this is the truth’ doesn’t make it so. While it is perfectly fine for the editorial board to publish an opinion on their preferred candidate, twisting the facts of who benefitted the most from TARP in order to do so is not above reproach.
“Stop sending around this photo of ‘Bernie Sanders’” — February 11th, 2016
Columnist Jonathan Capehart wrote a piece claiming that this famous photo of Bernie Sanders participating in a civil rights sit-in demonstration in 1962 was not actually him, but another man named Bruce Rappaport. After stating his case, he concludes the column by calling upon the Sanders campaign to stop using the photo in their materials, saying, “the least his campaign could do is remove that photo from its Tumblr feed and stop physically placing him where he existed only in spirit.” The problem is, after independent fact gathering, it became clear that Sanders was not only physically at the demonstration that day, but is in fact the person standing in that photo. Danny Lyon, the famous photographer who took the picture, produced evidence from the same roll of film that Bernie was at the event and wearing the same outfit.
But given this new evidence, Capehart and WaPo refused to apologize or retract their piece. Instead, the column has been updated with a short note at the beginning stating that there are “conflicting testimonies” about the photo. Perhaps the worst part of this ordeal is when Capehart tweeted that he only started interviewing Rappaport’s ex-wife and the photographer on the the day after his piece was published. It doesn’t take an expert in journalism to know that you should do your fact-finding before you publish. Snopes also weighed in on this in favor of the photographer, as has the University of Chicago.
“After tensions explode in Nevada, it’s time for Sanders to be honest with his supporters” -May 18th, 2016
WaPo’s editorial board opened this piece by stating that “Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shouted, cursed and threw chairs during a state party convention.” The ‘chair throwing’ incident was widely reported by multiple media outlets the day after the convention, often citing several tweets by Nevada journalist, Jon Ralston, who insisted on the veracity of the claim. Unfortunately, WaPo and other outlets did not verify that Ralston himself witnessed the incident firsthand before they published. In fact, Ralston actually left the convention early. There turned out to be no evidence for the story that a chair had been thrown at the convention, let alone multiple chairs, despite there being multiple people who filmed the events as they took place on their phones.
Since the false allegation was properly investigated, NPR’s ombudsman issued a clarification that “violence” did not take place at the convention. Snopes has since debunked the chair-throwing myth as well. Despite multiple sources investigating the claim and concluding it to be false, the Washington Post has yet to issue any remarks about their editorial board’s erroneous claim.
“Hillary Clinton just clinched the Democratic Nomination. Here’s the math behind it” — June 6th, 2016
WaPo joined the AP in pronouncing Clinton as the preemptive winner of democratic primary on
THE NIGHT BEFORE California primary voters went to the polls. While Clinton led the race in pledged delegates, and Bernie Sanders admitted it would be an uphill battle, WaPo published that the race was over before it actually happened.
A candidate needed 2,383 delegates to clinch the party’s nomination, and as of June 6th Clinton only had 1,807 pledged delegates. The AP and WaPo decided that they could add 576 superdelegate votes to Clinton’s tally despite the fact that they wouldn’t actually be cast until the DNC convention on July 25–28th. This reporting flagrantly contradicted the DNC’s instructions to the media on how to report their nominating process.
In April of 2016, Luis Miranda, the communications director of the DNC, directly told CNN live, on-air that super-delegate votes “should not be indluded in any count on primary or caucus night.”
Additionally, former DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that superdelegates, “have up until July to decide who to support, so combining them at each phase of this contest is really not an accurate picture of the way this works.” She then went on to point out that in 2008, superdelegates actually switched from supporting Clinton to Obama during the primary process.
The timing of WaPo’s announcement that Clinton clinched the primary race the night before the California primary was the real kicker, though. WaPo’s premature reporting both directly defied the DNC’s instructions and essentially told voters that their votes were inconsequential to the outcome. If Sanders had been able to gain more pledged delegates than Clinton before the DNC convention, some superdelegates may have decided to switch their support away from Clinton, just as they did for Obama in 2008. Ultimately, the math that WaPo and AP were using to call the race over was based on an inaccurate method of tallying the votes that the DNC had already informed the press about.
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — Nov 24th, 2016
In a widely shared article, Craig Timberg reported that more than 200 websites published Russian propaganda as an effort to discredit Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump. The basis for this claim was a report from a newly-formed, anonymous group called PropOrNot, which named countless publishers as witting or unwitting agents for Putin. Included in PropOrNot’s list were publications that featured Pulitzer-prize winning journalists including Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges.
Ironically, the Washington Post shares the Pulitzer prize with Greenwald for reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance revelations in 2002. When these and other journalists attempted to dissect PropOrNot’s methods, they reported that “verification of its work was nearly impossible.” The criteria for blacklisting these publishers as ‘fake news’ peddlers was extraordinarily wide. Basically, any outlet that offered a different viewpoint from the American establishment’s narrative qualified to be on the list.
PropOrNot tried backing up their findings by citing a 2015 article in the NYT by Adrian Chen about a Russian propaganda house in St. Petersburg. However, Chen himself wrote a rebuttal chastising PropOrNot’s methods stating, “Despite the impressive-looking diagrams and figures in its report, PropOrNot’s findings rest largely on innuendo and conspiracy thinking.” With the amount of evidence stacked against it, there is now an embarrassing editor’s note at the top of Timberg’s article stating that WaPo “does not vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s report.” The basis for the entire piece was not actually vetted.
“Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say” — Dec. 30, 2016
The link above is courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, as the original article has been replaced with an entirely new one. The original claim that Russia hacked the U.S. energy grid was found to be so false, in such a short period of time, that WaPo slowly rewrote the whole article into a new piece:
Kalev Leetaru wrote an hour-by-hour breakdown showing how WaPo continued to update the original piece on their site as more information became available to them. It morphed from a narrative that suggests the beginning of a new Cold War to a fairly pedestrian tale of possible malware discovered on a device that wasn’t even connected to the utility company’s system. The most concerning point about this incident is when Leetaru shows that WaPo published the story before contacting the utility company to confirm whether it was hacked. If WaPo had only waited to establish confirmation for their story, the entire hysteria over Russian hacking could have been avoided, as well as their lengthy retraction.
One more, I’m just gonna leave this here…
WaPo fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded Bernie “four Pinocchios” for his claim, only to be upstaged a little over a week later by Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, two professors of public health who lecture at Harvard’s Medical school.
If it is true that Bernie deserves “Four Pinocchios” for his tweet, why print a guest column the next week debunking the fact checker? Fair.org chimed in on this conflict and concluded that WaPo’s fact checking is at odds with actual facts.
While most readers enjoy dueling Op/Ed pieces, the idea of dueling facts columns isn’t that far off from what Kellyanne Conway is proposing.
You Can’t Trust the Media, Believe Me
So, what’s a few factual errors among friends, anyway? It turns out, integrity means a lot. We just witnessed an election season in which a candidate pounced on a lack of trust in the press and used it to his advantage. He made himself invulnerable to numerous attacks (even when they were factually based) because he could argue that the corporate media would only print facts when it suited their interests. He even tried to swing Bernie Sanders’ supporters to his side by reminding them that Bernie didn’t always get a fair shake in the press.
These tactics would be simply ineffective if there wasn’t an underlying truth to them. Unfortunately, our journalistic media has not always been forthright with the facts, or willing to rescind falsehoods. Op/Ed’s claiming ‘this is the truth’ when the reader’s experience is completely different creates a harrowing effect in one’s mind. And then we had a candidate rhetorically remind us of those shortcomings.
Now, he is no longer a candidate. He is The President of the United States. And in the current political discourse, his team feels comfortable enough to bring alternative facts outside, in broad daylight. And while the mainstream press expresses their outrage, they helped open the door.
Written by Justin Zarb. Edited by Kaleb Rogers and Katherine Sylwester
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