Over a week ago most major media outlets announced, again, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was about to be replaced. Well, he’s still in office. Was the story a non-story? Time will tell in this specific instance, but no matter what happens to Tillerson, we are in the era of created news, stories based on no facts, written to dominate the news cycle, not inform.
Take Billy Bush and that infamous Access Hollywood tape. The New York Times recently reported a source ("a person familiar with the conversation," so at least second hand) claimed Trump privately questioned the authenticity of the pussy grabbing tape. Nearly all established media outlets quickly jumped on the report, giving it greater validity simply by repeating it across the web until it could not be ignored. Sheer volume sent the story trending on social media.
Amplification also carried a neat twist: the source for the secondary tranche of articles became in most cases a credible "New York Times reports...," not the weaker second-hand somebody from the original report. But unless you bothered to chase the tale around the web links, you'd never know how little the whole thing was based on.
The next cycle were stories claiming Trump didn't deny (the modern equivalent of the "Are you still beating your wife?" question) the anonymous-sourced original story. No one questioned the logic of having to deny something that may never have happened in the first place. Those non-denial stories were followed by commentary from second-tier media proceeding as if the initial story was true, seasoned with the anxiety and outrage their readers demand as salve to their own anxiety and outrage. The third wave of articles were more sober, such as Op-Eds back in the New York Times, full circle, proclaiming Trump's non-denial of what may not have ever happened as evidence of his instability. Or something.
The point is no longer to inform -- remember, journalism -- it is just to keep the ball in the air, in this case to score political body blows against an easy, unpopular target. And for those who are fans of the surreal, the one person who truly seemed to benefit from all this was former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush himself. Bush, fired in 2016 for essentially being too much of a bro' with Trump back in 2005, made late night rounds auditioning for redemption by sanctimoniously confirming the authenticity of a 12 year old tape no one was seriously questioning.
This is all damaging enough when the subject is a puff of air like the Access Hollywood tape. The tape is from 2005, and its importance to voters was adjudicated by the last election. The game turns darker when the same strategy is applied to people.
Welcome to Rex Tillerson's world. Last week's stories of his impending firing/resignation (and in other weeks past and future, those for Sessions, Mueller, Mattis, Kelly, Kushner, Ivanka, et al.) were crafted whole by the media out of anonymous sources. They have circulated almost since his first day in office. They have alternated between announcing UN Ambassador Nikki Haley as Tillerson's replacement and proclaiming CIA Director Mike Pompeo as his replacement. Each story was based on the usual anon-sources, themselves a mystery even in anonymity -- were the no-names actually Chief of Staff John Kelly with a trial balloon, or a White House intern passing on a bit of cafeteria gossip? We don't know and the reporters do not seem to care to differentiate. What did matter is that each story published was blown bigger as multiple media outlets re-gifted one another's pieces, a house of cards with no real base to stand on that grew taller and taller as new outlets grew not much of nothing into breaking news.
The stories themselves eventually reached a critical media self-generated mass such that the administration was forced to again formally deny something that may not have even happened. The media in turn took the denials from Tillerson, Trump, and the White House spokesperson and simply dismissed them -- of course they are lying! It was the White House against the word of an anonymous source! Anything short of a full declarative denial was relabeled "did not actually deny," something in 2017-speak that counts as a sort-of "yes." Each denial actually breathed new life into what may be a non-story.
Of course Rex Tillerson will leave office at some point, and you can expect the media to claim his skin when he does, much like a weather forecaster announcing rain every day, then saying on sunny ones "Just you wait, I'll be proved right in the end!" before taking credit for being correct on the next wet day, whenever that might be.
The disturbing arrival of created news on the media table is mirrored by other unpleasant trends.
While much of this has deeper roots, the mass nervous breakdown that afflicted America on November 8, 2016 seems as a good an official start date as any other. Tricks that used to be the stock and trade of rags like the National Enquirer and its ilk, things like clickbait headlines at odds with body of the story, are now part of CNN and the Washington Post's vocabulary. Opinion and commentary are gobbled together with "reporting." Where once journalists took pains to separate their personal political beliefs from their reporting, follow modern journalists on Twitter to see their pride in being hyper-partisan in their unedited, personal comments. There are other new normals: it is perfectly acceptable to call out the president with schoolyard-taunts, or make a crack about the orange man-child, or toss out homophobic jokes about Putin and bromance. Writers build whole columns out of lists (“ignorant... churlish... tacky”) of personal insults.
Donald Trump’s victory was loathsome to the majority of journalists, whose cultural and partisan blindness lead to them misreport the election. Their reaction is this "new journalism." Though it is unlikely to fade during Trump's tenure, despite continuing issues with falling public trust in the media, the real question is what will happen after that. Will the hyper-partisan and sloppy new journalism shift to Target Pence? Will it follow a Democrat into the White House? Is it possible for journalism to snap back?
Peter Van Buren, a 24 year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan. @WeMeantWell