Trump Surrogates Spread Fox News Nonsense To Mainstream Media

One peculiar consequence of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump is that the mainstream television media has been invaded by marauding truth-free barbarians that have compromised its integrity. They are otherwise known as Trump's surrogates.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

One peculiar consequence of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump is that the mainstream television media has been invaded by marauding truth-free barbarians that have compromised its integrity. They are otherwise known as Trump's surrogates.

In normal times, the mainstream television media pursues excellence by seeking to adhere to well-established journalistic standards, such as the code of ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists.

A central tenet of journalistic standards is that reporting must strive to be accurate and truthful. Presenting the truth is crucial not only to the integrity of news journalism, but also to the proper functioning of nothing less than our entire democratic society itself.

Indeed, the role of the press is so critical to our government that the press has been characterized as the "fourth estate." This signifies that, even though the press is not a formal branch of our government, it is nonetheless so important that the press is regarded as an essential component to the proper operation of government.

The reason the press is so critical to society is because the press provides transparency to citizens by discovering and disclosing the real truth about what elected officials are doing.

During an election campaign, the role of the press is particularly important. The press performs a form of vetting on behalf of the voters to bring to light the truth about the candidates so the voters can make an informed decision at the ballot box.

For television journalists, a critical component in presenting the truth is the quality of their on-air guests and commentators. Normally, the television programs would vet their guests to ensure a high level of personal integrity and honesty. The Trump candidacy, however, has thrown a flying monkey wrench into the works.

The Trump campaign has dispatched representatives or surrogates to appear on television programs to speak on behalf of Trump. The television programs effectively have no choice but to allow these Trump representatives to appear. Otherwise, the programs would be accused of being unfairly biased against Trump by refusing to air Trump's representatives.

But this presents an ethical dilemma for the television programs because these on-air Trump representatives are entirely unmoored from the truth. They have no compunction whatsoever about appearing on-air and disseminating egregious distortions, misdirections, and flat-out false information.

This is partially due to the fact that Trump himself peddles false information, so his representatives must then defend Trump's false statements. And there are quite a lot of them. One analysis determined that Trump's statements are false or mostly false a whopping 78 percent of the time.

Normally, if a guest traffics in false information, that guest would not be welcomed back. But here, the programs have no choice. These guests are the official representatives of the Republican presidential candidate, so the programs must allow these guests to reappear repeatedly.

This places the programs in a very difficult ethical situation. In order to safeguard their own reputations and to uphold the journalistic standard of accuracy, these programs cannot just sit by idly and allow their own regular guests to disseminate false information. But at the same time, these programs were not designed to be rigorous fact-checkers in real time of their very own guests. It is plain to see that these programs, and their hosts, are struggling with this predicament.

One example is the CNN prime-time program, "Anderson Cooper 360." The format of the program features segments with panels of guests that often include Trump representatives or supporters, such as Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany, Scottie Nell Hughes, and Corey Lewandowski.

The host of the program, Anderson Cooper, appears keenly aware of the importance of striving to uphold journalistic integrity, and he deserves plaudits for performing yeoman's work in attempting to counterbalance the onslaught of specious information. But the burden is too great for one man alone to bear.

The army of Trump surrogates seems to be everywhere. It consists mostly of a B-list cast of characters, like Katrina Pierson, Omarosa Manigault, and Mark Burns, likely because A-list Republican figures decline to participate for fear of tarnishing their own reputations. But nonetheless some nationally known Republicans have joined the circus, such as Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Ben Carson.

The various television programs have resorted to several methods to attempt to address the problem of false information being disseminated through their shows. One method is to simultaneously include guests who offer opposing or balancing viewpoints to appear along with the Trump representatives. Normally, this is effective. But in the realm of Trump, it falls short.

One reason it falls short is due to the sheer volume of false information and the extent to which much of it is so outlandishly false. Another reason is because these balancing guests are just not professional fact-checkers. And they are also not experts at detecting the dark art of deception and debunking it all in real-time. This is simply too much to ask of them.

Another method that some programs have employed is to display a banner along the bottom of the screen that corrects in real time the misinformation being spoken by the guest on-screen. This is quite extraordinary. CNN ran a banner displaying: "Trump: I Never Said Japan Should Have Nukes (He Did)," and another displaying: "Trump's Son: Father Apologized to Khans (He Hasn't)." MSNBC ran a banner displaying: "Trump Says He Watched (Nonexistent) Video of Iran Receiving Cash." And the NBC Nightly News displayed the headline: "Trump Falsely Claims Obama Founded ISIS."

While these banners are excellent when they are employed, they are insufficient because there is too much false information being disseminated to be corrected by banners.

Another method is for a show's staff members to attempt to fact-check a statement immediately after it is spoken on-air, and then report the correction to the show's host through the earpiece. So occasionally a host will refer back to a statement previously made by a guest, announce that the show had fact-checked the statement, and then provide the correction.

Rachel Maddow recently took matters a step further. When she realized that the Trump representative, Kellyanne Conway, had apparently lied on Maddow's show, Maddow took to the airwaves on a subsequent program and flatly called-out Conway for lying to Maddow's face. Wow.

Like the banners, these on-air corrections are great, but they just cannot keep up with the volume of inaccurate information.

So the Trump representatives are able to get away with putting forth plenty of false information and distortions that remain unchallenged.

Another little ethical problem facing these programs is the danger of the false equivalency. When Trump representatives who have no regard for journalistic standards continue to appear on mainstream programs repeatedly, and when they appear right alongside highly reputable guests who are there to counterbalance the false information, the overall effect is to elevate the Trump representatives to an equivalent status of the reputable guests. It suddenly bestows upon the Trump representatives a level of legitimacy that they do not otherwise deserve.

The false information presented by the Trump representatives is also elevated to a status higher than it deserves as it appears to be the equivalent of the true information presented by the reputable guests, and thus the false information suddenly appears to be legitimate.

The end result of all of this is that the mainstream television programs suffer an erosion of their journalistic integrity.

The truth-free barbarity of the Fox News Channel has infiltrated the mainstream media.

------------
(A version of this article also appears on Salon.)

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot