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

longtime Clinton foe Jeff Gerth. He’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

I can’t help but remember the 1998 film The Truman Show. It’s a dark comedy about an orphan, Truman Burbank, unwittingly raised by a corporation in a simulated reality broadcast as a TV show around the world. Everyone is aware of the ruse except Truman, played by Jim Carrey.

The next day, the intensely political nature of the growing movement is underscored when Hillary personally jumps aboard the anti–fake news train. On December 8, 2016, she speaks to reporters after visits with members of Congress. She claims she’s appalled by “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over t

You get the idea. Everybody’s on the same page, using tried-and-true astroturf language to smear anyone asking questions about Clinton’s medical condition. We later discovered that Clinton was, indeed, secretly ill at the time. Yet these reporters declared definitively, as a matter of fact, that she was not.

Whatever the answer, they set about arguing that it’s wrong. Not worthy of a story. Old news. Disproven. Settled science.

Is it just coincidence that while 13 Hours is enjoying a respectable weekend box-office opening and rave audience reviews, there is a singularly negative, false narrative being furthered by the liberal media? There’s no better example of astroturf.

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

the end, Blumenthal’s efforts don’t get Hillary to the White House in 2008. And they come back to haunt him when Obama ends up president. Obama appoints Hillary as secretary of state and she wants Blumenthal to be one of her top aides. But high-ranking Obama officials threaten to quit if Blumenthal is allowed into the administration after what he’s

Investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept writes on December 9, 2016, “The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.” A top national investigative journalist tells me, “The subset of news that is fake is very tiny and inconsequen