The political philosopher, Richard M. Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences (1948) at the beginning of the Cold War era. In the 21st century, we are witness to "Words Have Consequences." CNN's Brian Stelter provides a valuable lesson in the importance of words in this essay. If this is the (fair & balanced) pursuit of truth in our public discourse, so be it.
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"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
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Trump’s Favorite Four-Letter Word
By Brian Stelter
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The Trump era is the hoax era. But not in the way he or his cheerleaders claim.
Donald Trump has shouted “hoax” hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment. At this point, his copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else.
During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump didn’t rely on the word “hoax.” He didn’t even say “fake news.” He called the news media “sick” and biased, but he didn’t seriously start to deny its legitimacy until January 2017, when he was confronted by evidence that the Russian government aided his election. That’s when he truly needed the news to be fake.
Looking back, Mr. Trump’s exploitation of the term “fake news” to smear journalists was the single most consequential thing he did during the transition period. He built the scaffolding for his supporters to reject any and all information that wasn’t Trump-approved.
After a few months, when “fake news” lost its power through sheer repetition, Mr. Trump introduced something far more sinister: a hoax. Something can be “fake news” by accident — a typo in a quote, a mistake made on deadline — but a hoax is malicious.
Well before becoming president, Mr. Trump had used the word a few times — to dismiss global warming, for instance. It’s “a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted in 2013. But his “hoax” hoax began in earnest in April 2017, when he told The Times that “the Russia story” — that it intervened in the 2016 election — “is a total hoax.”
His new talking point was set. He told Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller that every charge about Russia could be a hoax.
In the first year of his presidency, Mr. Trump cried “Hoax!” 18 times; in 2018, 63 times; and in 2019, a whopping 345 times, as measured by Factba.se, a database of the president’s tweets, speeches and interviews. The term became part of a feedback loop between the president and his preferred TV producers at Fox News, where his statements are largely treated as truth.
“Hoax is a potent word, in being an angry and mean one,” the linguist John McWhorter told me. It “carries an air of accusation, of transgression.” Mr. McWhorter called it “the quintessence of Trumpian self-expression.”
If you want to understand why a minority of American voters are unplugged from the fact-based news that the rest of the country depends on, just imagine being told multiple times a day that real news is a hoax.
Mr. Trump claimed that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her were part of “a hoax set up by the Democrats.” Recently, after the news broke that Russia paid bounties to militants for killing American service members, Mr. Trump tweeted, it’s “just another “HOAX!”
But mostly, “hoax” is used to try to wash away the Russia stain. It became a building block in his permanent campaign of disbelief, just in time for his impeachment in 2019.
Last week [8/18/2020], after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report, with yet more evidence that Russia had disrupted the 2016 election and that some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help, his campaign called it “the Russia Collusion Hoax.”
The word hoax used to be most closely associated with moon-landing conspiracy theories. But in the past decade, many Google searches for the word have been in relation to recent events, like the Sandy Hook school shooting — because of propagandists who falsely say that the massacre of children was fabricated in order to confiscate guns.
And this year, all the top “hoax” searches have been about the coronavirus. Mr. Trump and Sean Hannity each invoked the word once in relation to the virus, and have been on the defensive about it ever since. They both accused the Democrats of politicizing the crisis, calling that a “hoax” — framing the debate as a political, not medical, issue. Democratic leaders were, at the time, in late February and early March, calling on the administration to take the pandemic more seriously.
We will never know how many people fell for the “hoax” rhetoric. But we do know this: When you’re told every day not to peer outside your own bunker, when you’re told that evil forces are trying to make you the victim of a “hoax,” your world begins to shrink.
You don’t know whom to trust or what to believe. In San Antonio last month, the chief medical officer of Methodist Hospital, Dr. Jane Appleby, told the story of a 30-year-old patient, dying of COVID-19, who looked at his nurse and said: “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.” ###
[Brian Stelter is the anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Prior to joining CNN in November 2013, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times. Starting in 2007, he covered television and digital media for the Business Day and Arts section of the newspaper. Stelter was also a lead contributor to the Media Decoder blog. He is the author of both Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (2020) and Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (2013). Stelter received a BA (mass communication) from Towson University (MD).]
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