Nobody could possibly be surprised by conservative attempts to rebrand the phrase "fake news" to mean all the legitimate news that doesn't agree with their opinion, while declaring conservative outlets to be the only not-fake news purveyors. A history of similar declarations are literally what got us to this point in the first place; from Rush Limbaugh to Bill O'Reilly, from Brietbart to Fox & Friends, the entire conservative infrastructure is premised on the sincere belief that facts can be altered by, well, simply altering them.
Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”
Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”
There's also lists of purported "fake news" sites being peddled online by conservatives and fake news sites themselves, lists which claim that all one or two dozen of the most prominent journalism outlets in America are on the "fake" side while the dubious purveyors of the list are the only ones you can trust, which is a nicely packaged encapsulation of the very problem. The fact-checkers keep insisting that things Donald Trump says are objectively untrue—so the fact-checkers must be biased! The hoax-watching website Snopes.com says that the frothing conspiracy theory sent to you by your frothing conservative uncle did not in fact happen—so Snopes.com must be liberal as well! Rinse and repeat, for every story and every detractor, forever.
The problem here is self-evident. If conservative news consumers understood the difference between fake news—that is, fabricated information peddled to generate outrage and, therefore, a revenue stream—and real news, meaning news that actually happened, they would not be taken in by it in the first place. If so-called "mainstream" conservatives like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity had not spent a generation of shouting airtime declaring that any non-Fox news stories out there they personally didn't like were evidence of a media conspiracy against conservatives, we would not be awash in a sea of O'Reilly-watching, Hannity-supporting rubes conditioned to believe exactly that.
It was the whole point of Fox News and similar outlets, after all: to create a place where conservatism stripped world facts and events of their supposed liberal bias and either presented them in the fashion most flattering to conservatism or simply ignored those facts and events. On Fox News, welfare fraud is forever rampant, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and the state of the economy is whatever it needs to be in order to court a conservative narrative of Obama bad or tax cuts needed or Obama still bad. At Breitbart, the Black Lives Matter movement is not a reaction to the videotaped deaths of black Americans posing no apparent danger to the officers gunning them down but is all a ruse, a war on decent folks by the violence-prone other.
None of this is new, but two decades of it has left the movement uninformed and, well, gullible. The ads on conservative websites or the ever-feverish appeals of conservative mailing list have long been recognized as a scammer's paradise; for conservative radio listeners, the world is forever six months away from collapsing in chaos—so you'd better buy gold, or survival seeds, or both. There's a reason that the creators of fake news sites target conservatives, and it's not because the hoaxers share conservative ideology. It's because conservatives are more prone to believe those hoaxes.
“Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship by pundits. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”
The current debate over fake news is centered on actual hoaxes, things like the Pizzagate hoax that resulted in a very stupid and very armed man barging into a D.C. restaurant to “self-investigate” whether the Clinton-connected owner was keeping child slaves in a basement that didn’t exist. There should be no question that such hoaxes are deplorable; it should not be the subject of serious debate. But it is, because many big conservative names have dabbled too much on that line themselves—and they know it.
Setting aside those outright hoaxes, how enmeshed are the subtler forms of fake news in the mainstream conservative movement? Enmeshed enough that any average consumer of conservative programs will come away with deeply held opinions about patently untrue things.
Andi Ermes, 39, offered a number of reasons for disliking Obama. She said Obama didn’t attend the Army-Navy football game, even though other presidents had. Obama has actually attended more Army-Navy games than George H.W. Bush. She said that he had taken too many vacations. He has taken fewer vacation days that George W. Bush. She also said that he refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel. While it is true that Obama did not wear a flag on his lapel at points during the 2007 campaign, it was back on his suit by 2008. Ermes told me the news sources she consumes most are Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and a local conservative radio show hosted by Casey Hendrickson.
Now Rush Limbaugh and other purveyors of those manufactured outrages are very, very peeved at this new public debate over just how much untrue "news" is impacting our democracy and whether anything should be done about it, and they're lashing back with, of course, the declaration that they are the only legitimate ones and it's the rest of you reality-dwellers and fact-checkers that are the ones fouling things up.
Well, yeah. Of course they're going to say that. For two decades, it's what they've done. That is precisely how they built this new conservative movement to begin with.