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

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

After a suspension, Williams is reinstated in the anchor chair at MSNBC—where he later criticizes the Trump team for spreading fake news.

Transactional journalism has become key to a smear artist’s ability to formulate a Truman Show–esque alternate existence all around us. As with astroturf, it’s a vehicle to create a smoke screen, making narratives appear to be organic, hard-nosed journalism when they’re the exact opposite. Much like astroturf, this is a world in which little happen

dodged sniper fire on a trip to war-torn Bosnia as first lady twelve years before. She is apparently attempting to distinguish herself as more battle-ready than her opponent, Barack Obama. However, I had accompanied Clinton on that trip to Bosnia as a reporter in 1996. There had been no sniper fire.

A final example from Message Matters shows just how dishonest its messaging could be: ATTACK: “Health reform is pushing employers to not offer health insurance benefits at all.” RESPONSE: With the health law in place, 98 percent of workers who get coverage through their work are expected to keep their plans. In fact, the claim that 98 percent of wo

applying the “conspiracy theory” moniker was intended to convince the public to tune out the discussion, in much the same way as other common astroturf terms, such as debunked, bonkers, tin-foil hat, shoddy, discredited, quack, phony, bogus, denier, and crank, to name a few.

They told me that the Clinton administration had been embarrassed by the theft and needed to make it seem as if the culprit had been caught.

In October 2015, the Clinton campaign apparently uses PBS’s Judy Woodruff to “put the news out” that Hillary intends to reverse her support of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. To frame the coverage in a way most favorable to Clinton, the campaign arranges for Woodruff to break the “news” in an interview with Clinton, an

I’m inadvertently wrapped up in another fake news story in 2008, when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is repeatedly quoted uncritically in the press describing how she bravely