Perhaps the most accurate depiction of American media’s fanatical opposition to President Trump is a Glenn McCoy cartoon, which slaps viewers in the face by showing a maniacal inmate wrapped in a straightjacket inside a padded cell. The word “Media” is embossed on his chest, and dozens of “Trump” inscriptions are plastered across the floor and the walls, at goofy angles and in uneven letters. “He’s Crazy!” the wretch screeches, referring to Trump.

Recently, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University issued a report on President Trump’s first one hundred days that confirmed Glenn McCoy’s message. The Center’s Thomas Patterson stated, “The sheer level of negative coverage gives weight to Trump’s contention, one shared by his core constituency, that the media are hell bent on destroying his presidency. As he tweeted a month after taking office, 'The FAKE NEWS media… is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!‘”

Which, of course, depends on one’s opinion of American media, but certainly the Shorenstein Center’s review inspires exploration of reporting patterns that put accusations of media bias and, more recently, “fake news” into context. The following comments are presented as an attempt to clarify what’s been going on from about the 1960s, but which has intensified since the second Bush administration. In short, how best can one categorize American news reporting? Here are a few suggestions.

Propaganda

Probably the classic study of this topic was undertaken by Jacques Ellul, a Frenchman who deferred to an American’s definition, which characterized propaganda as an effort to influence “the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations.” This approach helps us to understand a great deal of what American media has been doing for the past two or three generations, especially since 2001.

Indeed, the Shorenstein Center data are breath-taking. For instance, CNN and NBC belched out a 93% negative rating in stories about President Trump; for CBS, the figure was 91% negative, while The New York Times and Washington Post clocked in at 87% and 83%, respectively. These data support the contention that the media outlets covered — NYT, WSJ, WAPO, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News (the only “fair and balanced” one of the bunch) — are in the propaganda business, period. They want to destroy Trump, and frankly, given Trump’s dismal approval ratings, their propaganda efforts seem to be working.

This means that American media have met the crucial standard emphasized by Ellul: effectiveness, the “supreme law” of propaganda, because “ineffective propaganda is no propaganda.” And as demonstrated by Tim Groseclose in “Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,” such practices over the decades have produced an extraordinary difference in political outcomes. For instance, “Media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election. … If media bias didn’t exist, then John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama 56-42, instead of losing 53-46.” And that’s just one finding in a tome filled with stunning revelations, which earned him heaps of threats and a determined smear campaign.

Fake News

This term is a recent entry in descriptions of media behavior but refers to a practice as old as humanity — lies. Fake news means simply that its perpetrators fabricate stories to make a political point, to advance an agenda (or themselves) and/or to smear and destroy an opponent. Much fake news currently deals with charges of rape, racism, or political malfeasance on many American campuses, where frequently standards of fact-checking are low, political ambitions high, and truth-telling often nonexistent. Further, current media habits of creating stories based on “anonymous” or “well-placed” sources have generated considerable amounts of fake news, some of which have instigated congressional investigations and FBI probes, such as the alleged Trump-Russia connections during the 2016 presidential campaign. With such unlimited possibilities, probably the fake news industry is here to stay.

The Deep Lie

Sociologists likely would use a term like “foundational myth” and all societies rest on them, some on a more benign variety, but totalitarian countries especially are based on Deep Lies. Thus, Stalin’s insistence that the USSR was infiltrated by innumerable spies, saboteurs, and “wreckers” supported a gargantuan security apparatus in the NKVD (later the KGB), and other agencies, whose existence was predicated on Deep Lies. Nazi totalitarianism was founded on Deep Lies about racism and Jewish treason (among other things); the Gestapo and death camps constituted huge industries based on such enormities and are inconceivable without them.

What about non-totalitarian countries, like the United States, the UK, EU, and others? Several Deep Lies come to mind, all are pernicious, and dissenting from their premises can get a citizen into … well, deep trouble. For instance, anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is an immensely pervasive Deep Lie that supports a $1.5 trillion industry, along with many thousands of government jobs. Challenging climate change orthodoxy can earn you the status of “science denier,” cost you your job, or even subject you to prosecution and imprisonment, if many of its devotees had their way. Like multiculturalism, whose assumptions rest on another Deep Lie, commitment to environmentalism constitutes a significant element of a tacit “Media Profession of Faith,” and it is hard to find a reporter who doesn’t subscribe to it, at least as a matter of institutional fealty.

Unfortunately, the implications of current media practices point in frightening directions, particularly in the poisonous political environment created by a rabidly anti-Trump media that has contempt for democratic processes. In fact, at this writing, it doesn’t seem necessary for the anti-Trump establishment — Republicans and Democrats alike — to control the entirety of the country’s commanding heights — academia, entertainment, corporate leadership, and government administration — but only the prevailing part of it. Whatever remains can be intimidated into silence, compliance, or at least rendered irrelevant. Meanwhile, the rest of the country will eventually succumb to the goals and mindset created by media propaganda, fake news, and Deep Lies, at the rate of one “news” report at a time.