Fake (But Accurate) News?

The President repeatedly lambastes negative press coverage about him as “fake news.”  Journalists blanch at the effrontery.  And then proceed to give the President additional ammunition with which to fire away.

Enter ABC News.  Still reeling from prior bad acts in this regard – a recent fake news mishap cost their chief investigative correspondent his job – the network’s news division has conceded to peddling still more fake news.  ABC News now admits that their widely-repeated accounts of the Trump administration “losing” nearly 1,500 migrant children last year was shocking but, well, not true.

And, in a twist that would be comical if it weren’t so inept, we are then told that this purveying of fake news served the greater good of unearthing accurate reporting on a real story – the policy of separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents at the southern border.

Left out of this journalistic two-step is the obvious truism that the media can investigate two different phenomena (even when they are parts of a larger issue, like immigration) and make a simple choice: Disregard the fake one and report the real one.  Instead, we’re offered something akin to the “Fake But Accurate” reporting of yesteryear that was so ruinous to network news credibility in the first place.

Dan Rather’s network news career was brought to an unceremonious end when he peddled what the NY Times termed “Fake But Accurate” reporting about then-President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard.  His obvious attempt at “gotcha journalism” several weeks before a Presidential election backfired, but Mr. Rather has been unrepentant for years.  These days he enjoys some limited social media celebrity among partisan leftists.  With no apparent sense of irony, he repeatedly calls for truthfulness and integrity in public affairs, with 100% of his criticisms being directed at targets from only one of the two major political parties.

Aside from these tactics collectively resulting in public trust of the media being at an all-time low, the distribution of fake news from these media outlets only helps President Trump in discrediting these media all the more.

There are plenty of times when the President merits criticism.

What good will honest and principled criticism do if it’s perceived as yet another attempt by the media to cry wolf?