It all depends on the meaning of "fake news"
Keith Davidson, an attorney who represented Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in their “negotiations” with the National Enquirer texted the publication’s editor-in-chief Dylan Howard on Election Night 2016 with a simple four-word question:
What they did is open a whole new era of what had been traditionally known as “checkbook journalism,” something that’s been around awhile and roundly condemned as unethical by reputable journalists. In its place we now have two new phrases: “catch and kill” and “fake news.”
But I’m pretty sure Davidson was more focused on enabling the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States.
Nevertheless, in charging Trump with criminal fraud for allegedly paying off a porn star to “catch and kill” her story about a tryst with the GOP presidential nominee years earlier, the trial is ripping the skin off the seamy underside of journalism — where money speaks louder than words. Or facts.
Enquirer Publisher David Pecker had been a long-time friend of Trump when, prosecutors allege, they joined with former Trump fixer Michael Cohen to protect him from, well, himself.
Pecker said his relationship with Trump began in the aughts and centered around The Apprentice, working through Cohen. The relationship expanded in 2015 when Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy.
It’s long been known Trump was meeting with the two men, where assistant district attorney Matthew Colangelo said:
“Together they conspired to influence the 2016 presidential election” with Pecker agreeing to act as Trump's ‘eyes and ears’ during the 2016 campaign.”
That included not just payments to Daniels, McDougal and Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin to stash their stories in an Enquirer safe, but also the birth of “fake news” with bogus stories about Trump rivals Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson.
The Daniels payoff played a significant role in the final month of the 2016 campaign, coming right after the Access Hollywood tape emerged. Republicans were vetting scenarios that included dumping him from the ticket after his lewd and crude comments became public. The last thing the campaign wanted to see was a reinforcing story.
Instead, with the aid of longtime political dirty trickster Roger Stone, we were almost magically treated to the Wikileaks publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails (an issue that became almost a religion to the New York Times.)
And although the FBI had cleared Clinton of any wrong doing in her use of a private email server many months earlier, the issue “miraculously” resurfaced in the waning days of the campaign.
Of course the Enquirer was not alone in shilling for the Trump campaign. Fox News played a crucial role in giving the New York developer valuable, um real estate, on Fox and Friends to attack then President Obama, stepping up the fact-free segments as 2015 turned into 2016 and beyond.
But the key difference was the exchange of money for disappearing negative stories.
Trump, of course, quickly devalued the term “fake news” by using it to label anything that he didn’t like written. But it has long been the coin of the realm of supermarket tabloids and print and video gossip mongers.
And has come to dominate today’s media environment, damaging the reputation and work of ethical journalists.
But ethical journalists are not innocent victims here either. The incessant drive for THE scoop allowed them to be easily manipulated by the Trump campaign (which also served up women who accused Bill Clinton of rape) to conveniently change the subject from Access Hollywood to Hillary Clinton.
So while Trump is on trial for using money to generate positive and negative news coverage to influence the outcome of the 2016 election it’s time to ask the business that Which raises the question — what have we done in enabling the election of Donald J. Trump?