The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote

The Clinton campaign and its smear machine, including David Brock, cannot absorb the blame or else they’ll be finished off in big-money politics. They must figure out new, more effective ways to stay relevant and influence public opinion. As such, they will quickly initiate new strategies that involve pointing the finger at Russia, FBI director Com

Meltdown: Time weighs in with a cover showing a cartoon depiction of Trump as a featureless mouth, melting away like a hot wax statue with a one-word caption: “Meltdown.” The cover is in turn covered by other media, as if it’s news.

Implosion. Vanity Fair claims “MASS DEFECTIONS EXPECTED AS DONALD

(Much later, MSNBC would obtain several pages from Trump’s 2005 income tax return showing—to the cable news channel’s chagrin—he actually paid $35 million in income taxes that year, at a rate well above that recently paid by Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama. Yet there would be no corrections or apologies from the media for their mistak

The political nature of the selective outrage was obvious. The “tell” is how American Bridge and its allies easily overlooked Democrats embroiled in similar plagiarism scandals.

When I pressed for an explanation, one executive told me, “Let’s wait and see what the government investigation turns up and report on it then.” Other excuses I’ve heard when a hot story gets shelved? “Let’s wait and cover it when there’s a congressional hearing.” “Let’s wait until ‘everybody’ is covering it.” Under the definition of original and i

What, exactly, is a smear? That depends on who you ask. One man’s smear is another man’s truth. In simple terms, it’s an effort to manipulate opinion by promulgating an overblown, scandalous, and damaging narrative. The goal is often to destroy ideas by ruining the people who are most effective at communicating them. What you may not know is that a

(In the face of overwhelming documentary evidence and testimony, the Justice Department would later acknowledge the so-called gunwalking campaign and would admit to having given false information to Congress. The story would become the investigative reporting story of the year, receiving an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award.) The Justice Departme

Fact-checking would come to take on new meaning in the 2016 campaign and beyond as code for discrediting Donald Trump. Democrats would open new war rooms devoted to “fact-checking Trump in real time.” They would coin the term factivist and successfully pressure journalists to adopt aggressive tactics that result in almost never proving Trump correc

toll. “I know it’s not your story,” the operators might tell the coworker of a targeted reporter. “And I don’t like speaking ill of one of your colleagues, but I’d hate for your network to get hung out to dry on bad reporting and I’m afraid that’s where you’re headed.