Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

It’s why so many reporters default to the “he said, she said” formulation, even on settled certainties like climate change. For a media outlet to pick a side in a debate, even when the facts are clearly on one side, causes some readers to question that outlet’s prized objectiv...

An Advocacy Model.

I am not arguing that the New York Times and the Washington Post become organs for the Democratic Party. While that would certainly be helpful in the near-term battle against an antidemocratic GOP, it would be bad for the country in the long run.

But media outlets should be willing to aggressively and transparently advocate for certain values like democracy, truth, stopping the destruction of the planet, civil rights, and equality. An embrace of these values would be a return to the days of muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell and a departure from the current ethos of covering politics like sports.

At times, pushing for these values would cause the media to side with one party over the other. Most of the time, but not always, that party will be the Democratic Party. Adopting this model would require media outlets to choose accuracy over balance; to stop treating climate change as a subject for debate or Republican efforts to overturn elections as “normal” po...

Build Immunity to the Big Lies.

For a while, fact-checking was an effective tool.

Shame worked on Democrats more than Republicans.

In 2010, PolitiFact deemed the Republican message stating that the Affordable Care Act was a “government takeover of health care” to be its “Lie of the Year.” As far as I can tell, not a single Republican stopped repeating the takeover message. But when actual implementation of the ACA undermined the promise Obama had made to Americans that “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” he stopped saying this and apologized.

The fact-checkers not only failed to stop Trump from lying, but by calling out his lies, they inadvertently broadcast them farther and wider and validated his false statements to people predisposed to distrust the press.

But if the goal of this is to

curb lying and convince readers of the truth, the media’s approach is failing miserably.

Punish the Liars.

Trump and his aides lied to reporters nonstop for four years and faced no consequences whatsoever.

Team Trump figured out early on that they could lie whenever they wanted, and the press would do nothing in response. The media’s failure to act was born of a fear of perceived bias as well as a thirst for access to

the people closest to the biggest s...

Publicly outing anonymous sources who lie. The anonymity granted to sources would be conditional upon their telling the truth. If they are caught lying, they should be exposed as leakers and liars.

Refusing to invite known liars onto prestigious media platforms for interviews. To his credit, CNN’s Jake Tapper already does this by refusing to have on politicians who promote the Big Lie about the 2020 election. (It’s getting harder and harder for him to find Republicans for his show.)

Refusing to provide live coverage for politicians who repeatedly use their speeches to spread disinformation. During the Trump years, the cable networks would cover Trump live, but then bring on a fact-checker to call out the lies. This was admirable, but unfortunately there was a significant drop in audience between the speech and the fact-checking.15 No one is saying don’t cover the president, a presidential candidate, or a f...

Build ...

The Times stated, “the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” This story was a massive boon to the Trump campaign just as the paper was trumpeting FBI director Jim Comey’s decision to briefly restart his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Trump of collusion with Russia. It was also 100 percent wrong. We now know, ironically enough from a different set of New York Times reporters, that the FBI was actively investigating direct connections and contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

In the five years since that incorrect story r...

Times has never really explained what went wrong, who lied, or how the paper could have made such a grievous mistake at such an important time. I am sure there have been countless meetings and internal reviews at the Times offices, but it’s been crickets for the public. This level of secrecy erodes t...

Move Away from the Digital Ad Model.

If the survival of your business depends on internet traffic, you are ceding control to the perverse incentives of the internet.

Therefore, a dependence on digital ads inevitably leads to doubling down on stories that get traffic regardless of their journalistic value.

To fight Trump in the short term and win in the 2020 election, we need a donor network to fund progressive media outlets that push progressive content into the Facebook and Twitter ecosystem. These outlets should be both Geo, Demographic, and policy based.

It’s time to invest in a progressive propaganda operation that can go toe-to-toe with the Right.

“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic.2

Saleforce CEO and longtime Obama donor Marc Benioff bought Time

The world has three major problems:3 climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, and widening economic inequality. The very wealthy are at the center of all three.

That’s why Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor made the risky but smart choice to start Crooked Media.

Pod Save America,

Crooked Media is

Mobilization: Pod Save America, and Crooked Media, is an extension of and reaction to the podcast Jon Favreau, Jon

Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and I hos...

The Democratic Party tends to outsource the job of informing its voters to media outlets that do not care if Democrats win or lose elections.11 For the thousandth time, that is an insane way to run a

political

p...

Take President Biden’s Build Back Better bill. The media covered it exhaustively. Every twist and turn was documented in dramatic fashion. Every utterance from Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the decisive votes, was treated like the delivery of the stone tablets from Mount Sinai. But after months and months of intense coverage of the legislative process, polls showed that even the most engaged Democrats didn’t have a freaking clue what was in the bill or how it would impact their lives.

This grassroots-distributed messaging strategy is a key antidote to the right-wing disinformation plaguing our politics.

The mainstream media has neither the reach nor the credibility to play referee against disinformation and conspiracy theories. This assertion will annoy many reporters, but look at how woefully ineffective the media was at pushing back against the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

A new model would focus on persuasion through content creation and distribution, not media coverage and press management.