How #FakeNews really got Trump elected

Let’s fast-forward through the schadenfreude-esque fun of watching The New York Times (“fake but accurate!”) and Brian Williams (“MY fake news got shot down over Iraq!”) wringing their hands over the current state of journalism and get to the real story of fake news: The “fake” part isn’t the problem. It’s the real news the media have declared “fake.”

When Trump-hating journalists (and yes, they loathe him) throw around the #FakeNews hashtag, they’re working the “Clinton Assassins Lure Kids Into Pizza Joint, Kidnap Them For Reptilian Overlords” beat. Their premise is that Trump voters are gullible morons who’ll believe anything, and insane stories about Satan worship and spirit cooking planted by Red-Menace Twitter trolls drove these dopes into Trump’s arms.

If you’ll believe that, my liberal friends, you’ll believe anything. Oh, and based on the huge percentage of the American Left that believes 9/11 was an inside job and rejects the science of vaccines, you apparently will.

There are many reasons why Donald Trump is our president-elect: Hillary; economic malaise; Hillary; chaos abroad; Hillary; and, of course, Hillary.

And yes, #FakeNews. As in, the “news” presented by the mainstream media that is clearly, obviously, demonstrably fake.

I’m a recovering talk show host who used to run GOP primaries for a living. I know the GOP primary voter pretty well … but not that well.

I completely rejected the idea that a big-government New York liberal who paid Hillary to attend his wedding would win a primary in my home state of South Carolina. But what I did see—and what I saw driving Trump’s popularity among the talk-radio right last spring—was how thrilled these voters were with a candidate who would stand up and tell the truth about the world that CNN/Washington Post/NPR etc. intentionally mis-reported.

The news that got Trump elected wasn’t made-up stories pushed by Twitter trolls, it was the stories Americans knew were true that the mainstream media and DC Establishment declared fake and refused to report.

There are dozens of examples, the most obvious being Islam and terrorism.

In the days after a self-declared jihadi slaughtered 49 people in a self-described mission for ISIS at the Pulse night club (“I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may Allah protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State”), I could hear my talk-radio callers turning into Trump supporters before my eyes … er “ears.”

As the media twisted themselves into knots to present an utterly-false story line about a self-hating gay man, Donald Trump was attacked for tweeting out almost immediately that it was a “radical Islamic terror.” Being Trump, he did so in a self-congratulatory way that was off-putting to many, but he was also attacked for stating the obvious about the deadliest Islamist attack on US soil since 9/11.

But as obnoxious as Trump’s tweet may seem, compare it to Hillary Clinton’s in the wake of the Paris attack months earlier: “Muslims … have nothing to do whatsoever with terrorism.”

Many Americans thought to themselves “Trump may be a kook … but he’s never said anything that stupid!”

This media meme—Jihadi kills while screaming “Allahu Akbar,” media announces “we’re still seeking a motive for killings,” politicians insist Christianity has the same problem with violence as Islam—is, from top to bottom #FakeNews. Worse, it’s a substitute for the real news, one of the biggest news stories of our time: The theological civil war inside Islam, a battle that has spread to Paris, Orlando, San Bernardino, OSU, etc. etc.

By intentionally getting the story wrong, the mainstream media/Washington establishment created the opportunity for Trump to scoop up the issue of Islam-inspired violence and run with it. Being Trump, he of course ran to “Muslim immigration bans” and “waterboarding,” but on the big issue, he was the guy telling the real story, while the mainstream media/DC elites peddled #FakeNews.

The other obvious example is immigration enforcement. For years the media/DC Establishment have dismissed the entire subject of illegal immigration as fake. If you only read NYTimes op-eds and listened to MSNBC talking heads, you’d think the only people who care about it are racist, crazy or both.

Meanwhile, non-racist/non-crazy Americans watched as tens of thousands of people from Central America poured across our border in a single summer. They weren’t sneaking across the Rio Grande in the trunk of a car. No, they walked right in, tracked down the nearest border guard and said “Papers, please.” They came illegally and demanded to stay. And we let them.

In fact, according to US Customs and Border Patrol, they’re still coming. Some 68,000 came during the “crisis” of 2014, almost 60,000 will come this year.

Trump’s core argument—our borders aren’t secure and our politicians have no interest in taking common-sense steps to fix the problem—is, well, inarguable. And from a media standpoint, being the only nation that doesn’t pro forma deport illegal immigrants sounds eerily like “news.”

But when American news consumers tune in stories about repeat-offender illegal aliens shooting citizens or driving drunk on our streets, what they find are facts coated in a sheen of #FakeNews: Suggestions that asking the immigrants legal status is bigotry, or painfully obtuse euphemisms like “unlawful entrant” (seriously) or, courtesy of the New York Times, “undocumented American.”

Once again, Trump is gonna Trump. So he talks about Mexican rapists and how a guy from Indiana isn’t really an American because his parents are immigrants from Mexico. So why didn’t those dumb comments hurt Trump more politically? Because the media bashing him are the same outlets who so blatantly feed us #FakeNews on the overall immigration story.

This is the “#FakeNews” Trump used to connect with the grassroots Right—not the “Obama’s A Kenyan Socialist” nonsense. And the list goes on. There are dozens of examples, from crime rates in the black community to Benghazi. Why I’m so old I remember when Hillary’s obvious, observable health problems were #FakeNews, entirely the purview of basement-dwellers and the Alex Jones audience.

And that was the “real” news … until Hillary collapsed in public on September 11, and even then the story was broken by a Facebook-fluent bystander, not a journalist; and major news outlets intentionally misreported for hours afterwards.

Do the journalism gatekeepers who’ve declared that stopping Trump is more important than impartial reporting understand that their stance actually feeds the #FakeNews they fear? By refusing to report facts that Americans see and understand, you’re acknowledging that “the truth is out there,” that these other sources may well have news that’s worth considering and taking seriously. If journalists really want to kill fake news, they’ll dump the politics and do their jobs.

For if, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, then in the media world where some truths are declared unspeakable, the crazy man who shouts them can be the most trusted name in news.

 Michael Graham is the Washington Examiner’s multimedia director. Follow him on Twitter at @iammgraham.Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.