If the news is fake, here's a look at how and why it got that way

Note: This turned out about three times longer than I expected. I was tasked with writing just about "fake news," but the article expanded into how and why news became thought of as "fake."

***

So Donald Trump called the "fake news media" the enemy of the American people.

I couldn't agree more.

With the words, at least. My guess is that the man I call Trumpers doesn't mean the same thing I mean by "fake news media." Still, I give him credit for getting the subject out there so we can attack a very real problem.

Fake news.

Too much media.

Too much entertainment.

Too much talk about rights and too little talk about responsibilities.


First off, most people misunderstand the word "media." Media is the plural of medium, and it has very little to do with news per se. "Medium" refers to medium -- or -- method -- of communication. There are essentially three forms of communication -- words, sounds and pictures, and combinations thereof.

When newspapers ruled media

A hundred years ago it was all about words, first in newspapers and then in magazines. They were controlled by libel laws and if they had a particular point of view, at least they were required to be factually correct if not impartial. They didn't hide their point of view, either. Newspapers had names like "Democrat" and/or "Republican" as well as the most traditional ones.

When people said "they couldn't print it if it wasn't true," that was at least the standard people expected.

The aim of newspapers was to inform, not to entertain.

And as recently as 1950, it seemed as though everyone who could read consumed the news through newspapers. Papers use a number called "market penetration" to see how good they are at reaching readers. One hundred percent penetration meant that each household in a given area subscribed to a newspaper.

In 1950, the number was around 120 percent, meaning that on average 20 percent of households were reading two newspapers.

That number is far lower now. Even including digital readership (people consuming news online), the number is less than 50 percent.

Where did they go? To news you could hear of see, of course.

The first real incarnation of something different wasn't radio. It was newsreels shown before feature films when people went to the movies. Starting as silent films in 1918, Movietone News was shown in the United States until 1963 and in England as British Movietone News until 1979.

There were several other companies doing them, including Universal, and while it may seem strange to us in these days of satellite communication where we can see live video from anywhere else in the world, to Americans during World War II they were views of things they would never otherwise see.

Newsreels were anything but comprehensive then, as witness this 1944 film that opens with the bombing of Berlin.




One thing important to remember with this and other wartime newsreels, audiences weren't seeing anything except what the government wanted them to see. One of the earliest newsreels with footage from Pearl Harbor tells the audience that the U.S. lost three destroyers. No mention of the eight battleships either sunk or damaged.

Still, wartime censorship is something people seem to have accepted for the most part.

Even as recently as the Gulf War, teleflubby Geraldo Rivera (one of the founding fathers of fake news) got in trouble for broadcasting his location with American troops. Sadly, he didn't realize what he had done was wrong.

But whether it's Geraldo, Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Grace or whoever holds the blow dryer, the problem is more what's getting covered than who's doing the covering. In 1974, Time-Life started the long slide downhill by creating People magazine.

First issue of People

All of a sudden, things were news that had never been news before.

Imagine Mia Farrow and Jim Croce in the same magazine with Solzhenitsyn and the parties, pets and personalities of the Palm Beach social scene.

All of a sudden, stuff that had been in the supermarket tabloids was now cleaned up and gussied up and treated as real news.

People led to Us Weekly and In Touch and all sorts of other, junkier magazines. Cable television exploded in the '80s with shows like "Entertainment Tonight"  and the Internet in the '90s, and what was considered "news" increased exponentially.

Entertainment Tonight

The Internet was where it got much, much worse. And in one respect it's where the whole "fake news" thing erupted into full bloom.

It started with "The Onion," which brought hilarity to the Clinton Years with stories like Bill Clinton being written up by his supervisor for clocking out early or Pat Buchanan moderating his view on gays by saying he would not incinerate them.

Then there was my own personal favorite from June 2001, a throwaway joke it literally took me a week to stop laughing at. Poor Jenna.

The Onion, June 2001

Let's be honest, though.

The three stories I just mentioned -- Bill, Pat and Jenna -- would not be taken seriously as news by anyone with any discernment.

They're jokes.

Nothing is believable about any of them.

Not even Pat Buchanan?


Not even Pat Buchanan. He would never agree not to incinerate gays. He's a man of principle.

But nobody would ever mistake "The Onion" for anything other than it is. Or other later sites like the brilliant UK site "News Thump." That site says "UK Spoof News and Satire" right up above the title. No confusion. No pretending it's anything it isn't.

Of course, those sites aren't fake news. They're far closer to the tradition of "Mad" magazine or the "National Lampoon." People read them for fun, and those magazines take us back to the times when all this started.

It started with Richard Nixon. Before Nixon, nobody thought the media was liberal. "Media" mostly meant newspapers, and if some reporters were liberal, nearly all the publishers were pretty far to the right.

Enter Nixon, the 1968 version.

When he ran for president in 1960, he played it pretty much straight. It was the only time he did. When he ran for his first term in Congress in 1946, he accused his opponent of being a Communist. When he ran for the Senate in 1950, he called incumbent Helen Gahagan Douglas the "Pink Lady."

Nixon built his career around two things -- anti-Communism and the belief that there were a lot more outsiders than insiders. And it was 1968 when he started attacking the Liberal Media.

Nixon, Reagan, Limbaugh and Trump

He is actually better known for his "Southern Strategy," taking advantage at the South's anger over Civil Rights to peel votes away from Democrats. "Law and Order" became a code phrase for keeping white people at the top and preventing civil rights from happening too fast. Twenty-eight years after Franklin Roosevelt carried every Southern and border state in 1944, Nixon carried every one of the same states in 1972.

The racism part of it got worse and worse. Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in a southern town of less than 8,000 people. Philadelphia, Mississippi, had absolutely no significance except for the fact it was where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

Reagan wasn't there for the memory of the workers.

Then in 1988, when George Bush ran to succeed Reagan, the Republicans rolled out Willie Horton.

But maybe even more important, starting in 1968, Republicans learned how to control the media by limiting access. Rather than running all over the place and letting reporters write what they wanted, they essentially staged one event a day and let reporters have no choice about what to write.

So campaigns became a sort of fake news almost unintentionally. I literally cannot remember a presidential campaign in the last 40 years in which issues really mattered. Maybe the best example of the way things changed was the Reagan-Bush "Morning in America" ad.




So whether it was politicians creating a phony narrative or the proliferation of cable channels and websites making up stories that aren't even remotely true, the news got phonier and phonier.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) went after conservatives, saying everyone was entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. Right around that same time, Reagan made what was clearly a misstatement when he said "Facts are stupid things."

Of course, we were reaching a point where people were becoming less and less discerning as to what was and wasn't a fact. That became especially true when Bill and Hillary Clinton came on the scene in 1992 and the rabid right accused them of everything from drug dealing to a series of murders, everything from the kidnapping of the Limbaugh baby to the cancellation of the Cosby Show.

The news got even more fakey with the explosion of right wing talk radio. Even before Bill Clinton took office, Rush Limbaugh was spreading fake news -- what we used to call "lies" -- about him. And when Clinton stumbled in his first year in office, Limbaugh was on him like a hyena on a wounded gazelle.

When Clinton friend and confidante Vince Foster killed himself, Limbaugh spent the next two or three years spreading the rumor that Hillary Clinton had had Foster killed.

And this was essentially when the word "honor" disappeared from public life, that and when Limbaugh referred to 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton as the "White House dog."

Survivor

Of course, that's not the whole story. Forty years into the television era, many people were spending as much time watching television in a week as they were going to school or working. Studies were showing that the more people watched television, the more passive their brain waves became.

And of course, at the same time people's brain waves were becoming desensitized to phony stories, television got phonier and phonier.

It started with "Survivor," with people being voted off the island and naked Richard Hatch winning the money. It was the birth of so-called reality television.

The "so-called" part of it was that "Survivor" and other shows was that they were actually more scripted than viewers knew. Maybe only a small contribution to fake news, but it was at least a few feet farther down the slippery slope.

More and more spoof sites popped up during the Bush years, but they were all reasonably obvious. It has really only been the last 6-8 years, particularly since the explosion of Facebook as a means for people to share things that interest them with the world.

Oddly, much of the fake news has been obituaries of people who are still alive.

But the fake that ultimately had the most effect was another television show that came from the creator of "Survivor." Starting in the 2004 season, Mark Burnett created "The Apprentice" and turned Donald Trump from a national joke into a serious celebrity.

Through most of the '80s and '90s, Trump was somewhat of a joke on the New York scene. He bragged about his sexual prowess on the front pages of New York tabloids and was well-known for his appearances at parties where underaged women were present.

Even his reputation as a businessman was shaky. He was sort of a clown.

"The Apprentice" changed all that. Trump portrayed a much better businessman than he actually was, and he was seen as intelligent, insightful, calm and strong. Many viewers thought of him as the apotheosis of  American business, as much a symbol of New York as Radio City Music Hall or the Empire State Building.

The show -- and his relentless self-promotion -- made him the perfect icon for fake news and indeed, fake America. During his campaign for president, Politifact said 70 percent of his statements were false. Two thirds of voters said he was untrustworthy, including one third of his own voters.

Yet he received enough votes to win in the Electoral College.

Call it the culmination of Richard Nixon's dreams, combined with the deterioration of American entertainment. Americans no longer trust anyone except people whop agree with them. Even facts are disputed in the most ridiculous way.

When people argue that the age of the Earth -- or for that matter the Universe -- is much less than has been proven by science, they dispute it by asking "Were you there?"

Anything anyone doesn't want to believe is called fake news, and politicians like Trump are quick to use it to further their own agenda. It's not just them, though. Average citizens are becoming less informed, largely because the better sources -- newspapers -- are disappearing.

The worst fake news of all comes in the form of stories the people who spread them know are false, such as the story that President Obama wasn't born in the United States.

Some things can be faked, but if you believe a birth announcement in a 1961 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser can be faked, you're way out there.

You have to believe there was a great conspiracy at the time a baby was born to make that baby eligible to run for president in 2004.

You have to have at least an MCT or possibly even a DCT.

Figure it out.

Actually, when the whole fake news thing started was when opinion sneaked off the editorial page and made it into news stories.

And just as bad, when television news submitted to false equivalency. Carried to an extreme, it would mean having two sources for a story about women priests, one the Pope and the other a homeless bum and treating them equally.

Another huge problem comes when the journalism knows someone is lying and doesn't call them on it. The whole "We report, we decide" meme of Fox News might be the worst of all. Most people don't have the education or the experience to think through complex issues on their own.

So they fall for fake news.

And things just keep getting worse and worse.

Remember Benjamin Franklin's famous remark after the Constitutional Convention.

"A republic ... if you can keep it."

Well, unless people want to start demanding the truth again, it's already gone.

And you can eat your lunch all by yourself.