When it comes to fake news, there’s an awful lot about President Trump

Social media users love commenting on issues that parade their virtuous feelings — too often to the detriment of facts.

US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Social media users love commenting on issues that parade their virtuous feelings — too often to the detriment of facts. Little gives them a better platform to show off their good hearts than a Donald Trump fake news storm whipped up by a media organisation friendly to the US Democrats.

Progressive politicians understand this and use social media to manipulate news they think will reap easy acclaim on Facebook and Twitter.

The best example is the phony debate about the building of Trump’s wall between Mexico and the US. You know, the wall many Democrats, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, supported in 2006 when George W. Bush proposed it. The same wall Hillary Clinton backed in public rallies as recently as late 2015.

Said Clinton at a town-hall meeting in November 2015 in New Hampshire: “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in, and I do think that you have to control your borders.”

Right. So the Democrat candidate who Left media organisations believe was robbed of election in November 2016 by a conspiracy between Trump and Russia supported a wall when she was a candidate for the presidency. And, by the way, the pictures of the wall you see on our ABC nightly news are of the 1000km already built, largely under Democrat President Barack Obama.

Voters in this country should be on to this sort of hypocrisy. Think of Kevin Rudd and the single biggest public policy failing since Federation, and Rudd had a few contenders.

In his last interview before the November 2007 election with this paper’s Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan, Rudd swore he would turn back boats if necessary to maintain the border control Coalition Prime Minister John Howard had established with his Pacific solution.

Within two years Rudd had relaxed the policy, 50,000 people had arrived by boat and 1200 of them had died at sea, including women and children. Activists who had for a decade claimed there was no people smuggling trade were forced to stay silent as Labor faffed about under Julia Gillard and finally introduced its Manus and Nauru solutions in 2013 under the second Rudd government.

Trump’s proposed wall is bigger than the proposal accepted in 2006 but Politifact and the large US Left-liberal newspapers are too cute when their fact-checking units dismiss claims of Democrat hypocrisy.

The first wall constructions actually began soon after World War I, and accelerated at different times to keep drugs out under President Nixon and people out under Bill Clinton after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993.

Between 2007 and 2015, largely in the Obama years, Congress spent $US2.3 billion on border fencing. Much of the wall that exists today was funded by the Democrats and any work done since Trump’s election was with funding supported by the Democrats. They have simply changed positions to curry political applause.

The stakes became higher over the weekend when Trump accepted a short-term political defeat to end the 34-day shutdown without receiving any funding for a border wall. At the same time there was potentially damaging arrest of Roger Stone, who officially left the Trump campaign in 2015, after being indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller. He was charged with five counts of making false statements, one of witness tampering and one of obstructing a congressional committee’s inquiry.

The criminal indictments were not about collusion between Trump and Russia.

The various iterations of allegations of collusion between the Trump election team and Russia are even more hypocritical. Media “investigations” with barely any source material continue to be published by organisations simply gaining traffic. They are prepared to compromise their news values for money.

Two stories that appear to have been published with little evidence and probably on the basis of leaks from organisations defending their turf against Trump hit during the silly season. Such attacks are up-ending US political positioning. The Democrats are now more hawkish than Trump. As a party of the Left they are now more anti-Russian than the Republicans. Never mind the principle, feel the social media applause. The Guardian on November 27 claimed Trump election campaign manager Paul Manafort had met Julian Assange three times at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London before the presidential election. The journalist Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize at The Guardian for his reporting of the Edward Snowden leaks, last week detailed the flaws in the Assange story for The Intercept. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with Greenwald and The Intercept.

As a kind of homage to Buzzfeed, originally a publisher of lists designed to gain clicks online, Greenwald compiled his list of the 10 most outrageous fake news stories about Trump. It reads like a Get Smart script.

Of the Assange story, number four of his top 10, he writes: “Seven weeks later no other media outlet has confirmed this; no video or photographic evidence has emerged (remember this embassy would be one of the most closely watched buildings in the world); The Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake.”

Number two on his list was the Buzzfeed “scoop” on January 18 alleging Mueller had internal emails and witness statements proving Trump instructed his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. Mueller’s office denied the story in its entirety.

Number one is a cracker that humiliated CNN on December 9 2017. Greenwald calls it “one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of US media”. CNN had claimed nationally that Donald Trump Jr had been offered by email “advanced access to the trove of DNC (Democrat National Committee) and Podesta emails (John Podesta was chief of staff to Bill Clinton and chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign team) published by Wikileaks”. In fact, the email Trump Jr received simply directed him to the Wikileaks archive after it was published worldwide.

CNN, like The Guardian and Buzzfeed, has never apologised or corrected the record.

This column has previously quoted, regarding Trump and Russia, the US civil rights lawyer and Democrat Alan Dershowitz, who gave an excellent interview to Sky News’s Andrew Bolt on December 11

Dershowitz argues the Mueller case against former Trump staffers has so far mainly concerned misleading evidence after the events: that is, lying to Mueller. He says Mueller will fail because his report will confuse sin with crime. Dershowitz harbours political doubts about the President’s judgment but he sees no evidence of Trump crime as yet.

So here’s the thing for media consumers.

If your preferred outlet continues to run uncritical allegations on a daily basis — as Nine (formerly Fairfax) titles and the ABC do — it’s time to move on.

If your outlet tries to sort the political spin from the facts?

When you’re on a good thing, stick to it.