{"id":59236,"date":"2020-09-05T20:07:41","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T01:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=59236"},"modified":"2020-09-06T00:25:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T05:25:24","slug":"59236","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=59236","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Journalism\u2019s New Propaganda Tool: Using \u201cConfirmed\u201d to Mean its Opposite.<\/a>
\nOutlets claiming to have \u201cconfirmed\u201d Jeffrey Goldberg\u2019s story about Trump\u2019s troops comments are again abusing that vital term<\/em><\/p>\n

ONE OF THE MOST HUMILIATING journalism debacles of the Trump era played out on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked off on that Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. when CNN, deploying its most melodramatic music and graphics designed to convey that a real bombshell was about to be dropped, announced that anonymous sources had provided the network with a smoking gun proving the Trump\/Russia conspiracy once and for all: during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks\u2019 servers………<\/p>\n

IT SEEMS THE SAME MISLEADING TACTIC<\/u>\u00a0is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle\u00a0centered on\u00a0whether President Trump, as first reported\u00a0by the Atlantic\u2019s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that \u201cfour people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day\u201d \u2014 whom the magazine\u00a0refuses to name because<\/a>\u00a0they fear \u201cangry tweets\u201d\u00a0\u2014 told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including\u00a0Sarah Huckabee Sanders<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0John Bolton<\/a>), deny that the report is accurate.<\/p>\n

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including\u00a0Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate.\u00a0Beyond deciding whether or not to believe\u00a0Goldberg\u2019s story\u00a0based on what\u00a0best advances one\u2019s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could\u00a0confirm<\/em>\u00a0the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.<\/p>\n

Other media outlets \u2014 including\u00a0Associated Press<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Fox News<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0now claim\u00a0that they did exactly that: \u201cconfirmed\u201d the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this \u201cconfirmation\u201d consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that \u201ca senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump\u2019s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,\u201d while Fox merely said \u201ca former\u00a0senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims \u2014 the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had \u201cconfirmed\u201d the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves,\u00a0due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.<\/p>\n

But whatever happened, neither AP nor Fox obtained anything resembling \u201cconfirmation.\u201d They just heard the same assertions that Goldberg heard, likely from the same\u00a0circles if not the same people, and are now abusing the term \u201cconfirmation\u201d to mean \u201cunproven assertions\u201d or \u201cunverifiable claims\u201d (indeed, Fox now says that \u201ctwo sources\u00a0who were on the\u00a0trip in question with Trump refuted the main thesis of The Atlantic\u2019s reporting\u201d).<\/p>\n

It should go without saying that none of this means that Trump did not utter these remarks or ones similar to them. He has made public statements in the past that are at least in the same universe as the ones reported by the Atlantic, and it is quite believable that he would have said something like this (though the absolute last person who should be trusted with anything, particularly interpreting claims from anonymous sources, is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has risen to one of the most important perches in journalism despite (or, more accurately because of) one of the most disgraceful and damaging records of spreading disinformation in service of the Pentagon and intelligence community\u2019s agenda).<\/p>\n

But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is \u201cbelievable\u201d or \u201cseems like it could be true.\u201d Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they \u201cconfirmed\u201d a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet.<\/p>\n

Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops, conflating the crucial journalistic concept of \u201cconfirmation\u201d with \u201chearing the same idle gossip\u201d or \u201cunproven assertions\u201d is a huge disservice. It is an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have \u201cconfirmed\u201d a CNN report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false. Clearly, the term \u201cconfirmation\u201d has lost its meaning in journalism.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalism\u2019s New Propaganda Tool: Using \u201cConfirmed\u201d to Mean its Opposite. Outlets claiming to have \u201cconfirmed\u201d Jeffrey Goldberg\u2019s story about Trump\u2019s troops comments are again abusing that vital term ONE OF THE MOST HUMILIATING journalism debacles of the Trump era played out on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deceit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59236"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59246,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59236\/revisions\/59246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}