1. Compare it to your direct, in person, knowledge of what’s being reported.
2. Ask if it fits or contradicts your general understanding of how the world works.
3. Ask if it fits with the timelines, patterns, promises, actions, etc. reported in multiple other stories about this news subject, including ones with different worldviews than your own.
4. See if other people have identified it as fake by Googling the story and adding something like “scam” or “truth” after it.
5. Test the source of the story or fact check by looking up other things the reporter or fact checker has put out to see whether they have a track record of truth or lies, or if their personal/political/financial interest in the story might influence their assertions.
Those are the basic strategies I use to tell if something is honest reporting or fake news. Most people use the first two automatically, subconsciously. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of fake news that plays into people’s biases, hopes, and fears, and gradually warps their “general understanding of how the world works,” strategies #3, #4, and #5 become ever more important. And sometimes finding the truth ain’t easy.
Here’s how that played out for me one upsetting day.
A “no spin” newspaper?
A free sample newspaper showed up on our doorstep. Interesting. I like free. But after giving it a quick read to analyze whether it was what it said it was, an “independent” newspaper with “no spin, no bias, and no agenda,” I quickly decided it was not. Why, though? What set off that “fake news” alert?
Well, to be honest, strategies #1 and #2 kicked in even before reading the paper itself. Because the paper was wrapped in an introductory note of welcome, a sales pitch. It told me The Epoch Times was “independent.” (This means what? Someone has to pay for the reporting and printing.) It was “rooted in traditional values.” (Among the folk I know, that’s usually a buzzword for right-wing social platforms I rarely agree with.) And it was “exposing communist infiltration.” (This one is just weird, though if you read to the very end of this post you’ll find where it comes from.)
I plunged on anyway, delving into the newspaper itself and quickly knew something was wrong. But what exactly? Was the lead story I was reading poorly-researched, biased, really a mix of fact and opinion, straight opinion, or completely fake news AKA alternative facts AKA lies?
The lead story involved the US Inspector General’s report delivered in December 2019 that essentially looked into the FBI’s opening of the investigation (Crossfire Hurricane) into the Trump 2016 campaign, the FBI’s subsequent FISA applications to surveil Carter Page, and other related investigations they did around this time.
I thought immediately that the way they talked about the IG report, especially how the Christopher Steele dossier about Trump and the Russians was all discredited, sounded off. But I hadn’t actually read the IG report and wasn’t sure I’d had any solid reporting on it either. So strategy #3, I went online and found multiple stories suggesting my understanding of the IG report was wrong. So I hunted down a copy of the report itself. I read the executive summary and skimmed some other stuff I was interested in.
To my surprise, I was wrong about what I thought it had said.
Down the rabbit hole
My brief reading of the report revealed the IG concluded the investigation was opened properly, based on the report from a “Friendly Foreign Government” about things they’d heard from George Papadopoulos about potential links between Russia and the Trump campaign. But he found the later FISA applications to surveil Carter Page relied significantly on the Christopher Steele dossier, which he found had not been corroborated in any way other than in its general assertion that members of the Trump campaign were having meetings with Russians. The IG’s final conclusion seemed to be that the FBI had done nothing illegal or politically biased, but that their FISA applications were riddled with misstatements and omissions and they needed to clean up their act.
Okay, The Epoch Times got the weakness of the Steele dossier right. They were also right the FBI shouldn’t have relied on it the way they did to get their FISA warrants on Page. But…something still felt off about the Epoch Times’ article.
Looking at the article again, I realized The Epoch Times had cherry picked what I would say were tangential findings in the IG report to back up the idea floated by some Republican lawmakers that the FBI investigations were ultimately based on a Russian disinformation campaign. The idea was that the Russians fed negative information about Trump through former-British-MI6-agent Christopher Steele so that they would have control over the narrative. The Epoch Times did note that the FBI considered this possibility and discounted it, but The Epoch Times countered with a University of Mississippi law professor named Ronald Rychlak, who co-authored a book called Disinformation. Professor Rychlak theorized that actually feeding this disinformation through Steele would be consistent with how Russian disinformation campaigns operate. The Epoch Times let him theorize, in fact, for about a third of their lengthy article. Part of that included suggesting that the FBI and Hillary Clinton may have known it was all disinformation. Then the article’s author turned back to the IG’s criticisms about the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier to imply the FBI should have known from the start that Christopher Steele and his dossier were both unreliable.
Now you see? You see how much work I had to go through to know to figure out if this article was fake or just biased? And I wasn’t done yet!
No, because it struck me how this article had tried to lead me with a few honest facts to a wrong conclusion – that the FBI went after Trump for political reasons. Which is interesting, because the IG report that it talked about explicitly said that is not what happened.
Hm. It’s almost like The Epoch Times was somehow feeding me…disinformation.
How did it do that?
How to spin the news
1. Omission of facts and context – The article did not note, for example, that the FBI had already been suspicious of Carter Page for, among other things, his dealings with Russian spies back in 2013 (he claimed he didn’t know they were spies). And in the height of the election, July 2016, Page flew to Moscow. It matched up nicely later with the Steele Dossier’s assertion of him meeting an ally of Vladimir Putin there. So the FBI would have been mentally predisposed to assume the Steele dossier was onto something. They might have been wrong, but for good reason. (I knew some of this stuff, but I researched it to refresh my memory and learned new stuff – strategy #3 and a bit of strategy #4.)
Also, while the Mueller Report might have said it couldn’t prove the Steele dossier’s assertion that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to have Russia help Trump’s election in return for him easing US sanctions, what did Mueller find? He found that Trump’s people met many times with Russians. He found that Trump Jr. actually invited Russia’s help (though there wasn’t enough evidence of “state of mind” to charge him with campaign finance violations). He found that Trump publicly called for Russia’s help in finding Hillary’s missing e-mails and Russia tried hacking into the DNC servers that same day. He found that Trump reportedly directed his aide J.D. Gordon to support watering down aid to Ukraine during the 2016 GOP convention. All but possibly the Trump Jr. meeting were known to the FBI before the report of George Papadopoulos’s conversation in a London wine room about Russia having Hillary’s e-mails that purportedly got the FBI to open their investigation into Trump’s campaign. By this point, the FBI did not need the Steele dossier to want to know what the hell was going on. (Lots of strategy #3 here just to get the timelines straight.)
2. Speculation – This is a great tool of spinmeisters and biased reporting. You ladle out a few facts then you bring in an “expert” to speculate hard about what it all means. In this case about a third of this large Epoch Times article was a law professor with no direct knowledge or documented evidence of Steele being deliberately fed wrong information, speculating that this is what happened and why. It was about as egregious as a mainstream news station endlessly speculating on the precise form of kompromat Putin has on Trump to get him to do his bidding. Speculation might be entertaining, but until the facts come out, it’s neither real nor fake news; it’s not news at all.
You can see how this all made my head hurt. This was one little story that I couldn’t judge the accuracy of until I’d read the IG report, reexamined dates and times of when people knew stuff, all after I mentally went through a lot of information I’d absorbed since 2016 about how the American elections system and Inspector General and Special Counsel, the Congress and its committees, and the Justice Department all work… And even then, I’m sure I didn’t get all the relevant facts because there are a lot of people still trying to hide stuff from public reporting. (This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s official government policy, for good or ill. And human nature.)
Always check the source
Oh, and did I forget strategy #5?
I Googled “The Epoch Times.” It turns out it was started by a member of the Falun Gong and is still closely associated with that Chinese spiritual community. Former Falun Gong members told NBC in August 2019 that the group’s stated goals are to take down the Chinese government and communism, which is why they support Trump, whom they see as a great anti-communist fighter. The Epoch Times’ digital production company NTD, meanwhile, is doing well financially with, among other things, its heavily-advertised dance troupe, Shen Yun, and a YouTube channel called “Edge of Wonder” that peddles QAnon and other deep state conspiracy theories, including reports of the Illuminati, alien abduction, and the Spygate cabal that’s a front for a global pedophile ring that Trump is going to take down. Yay, Trump!
Whew. See what happens sometimes when you scratch the surface?
So quite apart from the insidious bias I found in the main article I reviewed above, my #5 strategy alone tells me I will not be subscribing to The Epoch Times because, where I first thought they might be just a somewhat right-wing alternative newspaper, I now believe their broader worldview has too much crazy in it for me. I sometimes look at crazy for entertainment, but not for news.
Keep learning!
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