He was also struck down by illness on the eve of the serialization, so it was left to his co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, to do the publicity interviews. She had already been involved in one of the greatest possible sins against journalism, when her source for a story about the criminal activities of Lib Dem cabinet minister Chris Huhne (his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce), was unveiled and later imprisoned, despite Oakeshott initially promising her that the chances of prosecution ‘were minor’.28 Now Oakeshott compounded her offences by offering the most pathetic possible justification – or rather lack of justification – for the pig story, which had taken off like a rocket and was dominating the news. ‘We didn’t get to the bottom of that source’s allegations, so we merely reported the account that the source gave us,’ she shrugged on Channel 4 News. ‘We didn’t say whether we believe it to be true. It’s up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not.’29 Asked about proof at the Cheltenham Literature Festival a few weeks later, she was even more insouciant. ‘I think it rests on a really false premise, which is that things that are written in books need to have the same standard – if you like to use that word – as things that are written in newspapers,’ she told the crowd. ‘You might just as well say, “Well, you couldn’t have put that in Barbie Princess magazine.” ’30 By Oakeshott’s logic, this being a book, I could justifiably write anything I wanted to about Oakeshott’s own sexual behaviour. But I won’t. I will merely note that Dacre was so impressed with her attitude to journalism that he gave her a job on the Mail, much to the disgust of the rest of the political team. She lasted a year.
For Cameron’s part, he issued ‘a very specific denial… for the specific issue raised’ by Ashcroft and added that ‘I can see why the book was written and I think everyone can see straight through it.’31 And for all the appalling things David Cameron has done – only some of them as a student, when he admits belonging to the deliberately obnoxious, snobbish and restaurant-wrecking Bullingdon Club – there remains no evidence that he has ever inserted any part of himself into any part of a pig, however much people would like it to be true.
‘I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.’
Donald Trump, campaign rally, Alabama, 21 November 2015
Donald Trump, property developer, bully, blowhard and reality TV star, stood in front of a rally of supporters in Birmingham, Alabama, and basked in their approval. Record crowds were turning up for him everywhere he went on the campaign trail. More than four thousand people had turned up to his first big event in July 2015, filling the venue in Phoenix, Arizona, to capacity. Trump claimed there were fifteen thousand at the event but officials ‘don’t want to admit’ to it.32 He knew exactly how to play his fans, and, as former Republican presidential candidate John McCain had put it, ‘fired up the crazies’.33 Racism generally did it: a rant about Mexicans always hit the spot.34 Sometimes, like tonight, he got the chance to let them put some of it into practice; when black activist Mercutio Southall Jr started chanting ‘Black lives matter!’ in the middle of Trump’s speech, the audience turned on him and started kicking and punching him as Trump shouted his approval from the podium: ‘Get him out of here. Throw him out!’35 ‘Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,’ shrugged the future president on Fox News the following Sunday morning. ‘I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble.’36
Now it was the turn of the Muslims. The previous week he had linked recent terrorist attacks in Paris with President Barack Obama’s plan to accept refugees from the Syrian civil war, telling a crowd in Texas, ‘You’d have to be insane.’37 Now he was telling them the bad guys were already in the US. The native New Yorker informed his Southern audience that he had personally witnessed ‘thousands and thousands’ of people in neighbouring New Jersey – a state with one of the biggest Muslim populations in the country – ‘cheering’ as they watched the World Trade Center towers collapse on 9/11.38
It was a baseless fiction that had been circulating online ever since that devastating day. George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed Trump on ABC News’s Sunday morning programme This Week, told him so. ‘You know, the police say that didn’t happen and all those rumors have been on the Internet for some time. So did you misspeak yesterday?’
‘It did happen. I saw it,’ was Trump’s blunt reply.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You saw that –
TRUMP: It was on television. I saw it. It did happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: – with your own eyes?
TRUMP: George, it did happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Police say it didn’t happen.
TRUMP: There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might not be politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering…. It was well covered at the time, George. Now I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.39
Refuting Trump’s lies is like nailing down jelly, but the Washington Post, whose ‘Fact Checker’ feature had been working overtime since Trump put himself forward as a Republican candidate, had a go. ‘Extensive examination of news clips from that period turns up nothing,’ said the paper, which has been one of the most respected investigative outlets in the world since it broke open the Watergate story in 1972, and one of the best resourced since Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. They found that a local paper, the Newark Star-Ledger, had shot down the story as early as 18 September 2001, when it reported that ‘rumours of rooftop celebrations of the attacks by Muslims here proved unfounded.’40 Now the New Jersey Police Commissioner confirmed to the Post, who recorded his words in their own inimitable house style: ‘That is totally false. That is patently false. That never happened. There were no flags burning, no one was dancing. That is [barnyard epithet].’41 The New Jersey attorney general at the time of the attacks recalled investigating the ‘disturbing’ report. ‘We followed up on that report instantly because of the implications if true. The word came back quickly from Jersey City, later from Paterson. False report. Never happened.’42
All that existed to support Trump’s contention was a line from in the Washington Post itself, from an article written by Serge F. Kovaleski and Fredrick Kunkle: ‘In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.’43 Their story appeared seven days after the attacks, on the same day the Star-Ledger reported the allegations were unfounded. Now Kunkle explained their reporting: ‘I specifically visited the Jersey City building and neighbourhood where the celebrations were purported to have happened. But I could never verify that report.’44 Kovaleski told the Post’s Fact Checker: ‘I certainly do not remember anyone saying that thousands or even hundreds of people were celebrating. That was not the case, as best as I can remember.’45 Let alone the ‘thousands and thousands’ witnessed by Trump.46
A few weeks later defenders of the presidential candidate gleefully uncovered a local TV news report from 16 September 2001 that suggested people in a Jersey City neighbourhood had witnessed ‘eight men celebrating’ on a rooftop. Breitbart, the batshit-crazy rightwing website from which Trump would later recruit his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, ran the fourteen-year-old video clip under the headline ‘TRUMP 100% VINDICATED’.47 Eight men versus ‘thousands and thousands’: you do the math. The journalist who originally presented the story, Pablo Guzmán, felt moved to point out: ‘The report never said thousands cheering on roofs.’48
Even if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt he doesn’t deserve and suppose that he really did ‘have no idea who this reporter is… what he looks like’, would you not be so devastated that you would immediately issue a grovelling apology and try to organize one of those contrite visits Gordon Brown was always having to do when he inadvertently offended people? Not the Donald. As ever, he doubled down. He added insult to injury in his denial – ‘I have no idea who… Serge Kovalski [sic] is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence.’ He used the opportunity to boast about himself: ‘Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him.’54 And when the furore refused to die down within the space of a day, he issued a second statement: ‘Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago – if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did. He should stop using his disability to grandstand’.55
Did his supporters believe his explanation that he ‘merely mimicked what I thought would be a flustered reporter trying to get out of a statement he made long ago’?56 Did they believe anything he said? Did it matter, when he could just call anyone who posed awkward queries about the fantasy world he was creating around himself ‘fake news’ and refuse to even listen to their questions, let alone answer?
Five months after he was elected as US president – in what he claimed was ‘the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan’,57 but was actually a smaller margin than those of George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 – Donald Trump gave an interview to Time magazine which was specifically focused on his relationship with truth. Like Humpty Dumpty’s words, it appeared to mean ‘just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’. The president refused to concede that he had ever said, could ever say, anything that turned out to be wrong, because ‘I’m an instinctual person. I tend to be right.’ One example that the interviewer threw back at him, seventeen months after the fact, was the tale of the celebrating Muslims on 9/11. ‘Look at the reporter,’ Trump shrugged. ‘Well if you look at the reporter, he wrote the story in the Washington Post.’58
‘Some things you won’t hear on the BBC and MSM’
@JeremyCorbyn4PM, Twitter, 7 May 2016
Two days after Labour had become the first opposition party since 1985 to lose seats in local elections and fall behind the Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament, a Twitter account called JeremyCorbyn4PM – not an official one, but one of the most fervid fan accounts that had sprouted around the veteran leftie ahead of his surprise victory in the leadership election the year before – posted something rather striking. ‘Some things you won’t hear on the BBC and MSM,’ ran the Tweet, using the derisive acronym for the ‘mainstream’ media. ‘Labour is the most popular party and @jeremycorbyn has a huge mandate’.59 The accompanying graphic – a Photoshop job that must have taken someone a bit of time to put together – offered evidence for both these claims: Labour leading the projected national share of the vote on election night with 31 per cent, and a list of the results in the leadership contest which showed him trouncing his rivals, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.
There was just one problem, which was swiftly highlighted by other Twitter users, including Huw Edwards, presenter of the BBC News at Ten. Both images, as was obvious from the branding and the presence (in one of them) of swingometer-botherer Jeremy Vine, were taken from coverage on the BBC.
It was far from the only example. A few months later – before realizing it was a pointless task – I found myself taking issue with a much-shared Facebook post on the day of a protest against Britain taking part in military action on Syria. It showed a sea of protesters streaming past Big Ben, with the accompanying text ‘2 million on anti-war March today in London. And not mentioned by the BBC.’60 Even the organizers of the protest, Stop the War, only claimed five thousand people had turned up. The accompanying photo, an aerial shot taken by that most mainstream of media organizations, the photo agency Getty Images, had been taken thirteen years earlier: it showed the crowd at the 2003 march against the Iraq War which may or may not have numbered 2 million. The BBC had posted reporters to the more recent protest throughout the afternoon, delivering frequent pieces to camera for their twenty-four-hour news channel. It had been the lead story – albeit bundled up with details of the divisions in Labour ahead of the parliamentary vote on military action – on that night’s News at Ten.
Articles on self-appointed ‘alternative news’ sites regularly cite reports in the Daily Mail or Sky News as evidence that the MSM is deliberately neglecting stories. Challenge any of these online truth tellers and you will get the same catch-22 response: they wouldn’t know, because they don’t look at the mainstream media, because they can’t trust it, because it doesn’t show these things. Often the exercise reaches its most self-satisfied peaks in the wake of terror attacks on Western countries, when Internet users vocally blame media racism for the fact they couldn’t be bothered to read reports about similar incidents in other parts of the world. From here it is a short hop to the right-wing insistence that non-existent issues – sharia law being imposed on Britain, terror attacks in Sweden and American suburbs – are being deliberately hushed up. Of course it might be because the mainstream media have looked into them and found no evidence of anything – but then, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
This way, madness lies.
‘In the emails, you will read this Comet Ping Pong seems to be a hot-spot, serving as a fundraiser location for both Obama and Hillary Clinton. Why would they choose a pizza joint supposedly kid-friendly with the main attraction being PING PONG TABLES??… at very best, these are very odd, probably Satanic people. At worst, they are part of a massive pedophile and human trafficking ring that involves some of the world’s most powerful people.’
Anonymous, blog devoted to ‘Pizzagate’, 7 November 2016
Delusions are catching. When the man who would be president lives in a fantasy world of his own creation, why should his followers do anything else?
In November 2016, just days before the US election, a very peculiar story seeded itself in a fertile corner of the Internet and began to spread. It stated that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was somehow involved in a child-trafficking paedophile ring that centred on an impractically public venue: a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.
The story was ingeniously crafted. There were elements of reality in the recipe – dubious info-dump
ers WikiLeaks, almost certainly with the help of Russian forces determined to disrupt the election, had recently posted a number of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s personal emails online, including ones to a man called James Alefantis discussing having a fundraising event for Clinton at the restaurant he owned, Comet Ping Pong. Alefantis had once been romantically involved with another prominent Clinton campaigner, David Brock. From there, it leapfrogged off into the craziest corners of conspiracy theory. The ‘evidence’ included the restaurant’s menu and signs for many neighbouring businesses, which, they said, contained ‘pedophilic symbols’ reminiscent of those generally – and barmily – credited to the so-called Illuminati. Characters who regularly featured in such paranoid fantasies, ranging from the Rothschild family to Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Jay Z, were present and correct around the edges of this one too. ‘I am honestly horribly frightened at what we’ve uncovered,’ one of the posters wrote, ‘and I fear for the life of those who try to expose it, including my own.’61
‘Theory’ would be a generous title for what it all amounted to: random emails and images torn out of context and generously doused with supposition and some warped mischief. It all swirled around web communities 4chan and Reddit, specifically a Reddit subforum of Trump supporters called ‘r/The_Donald’. Chants of ‘Lock her up!’ had become a staple of Trump rallies, and those with the loudest voices were quite happy to believe Hillary was guilty of any crime you could come up with. Those who had detested the Clintons ever since the Ken Starr days had long been convinced the couple were capable of any and every debauchery. Even the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation in countries such as Haiti had been recast as something considerably more sinister. ‘Is it a coincidence Clinton Foundation only works in countries that do not issue birth certificates?’ demanded one foaming propagator of the Pizzagate meme.62
The Lies of the Land Page 25