The Necessity of Credibility: Ridding ourselves of fake news requires having media outlets that are actually worth listening to…
Despite having decisively won the presidential election by the only measure that counts, the Electoral College, Donald Trump recently decided to call the legitimacy of the entire process into question. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted.
There was instant widespread condemnation of Trump. The New York Times ran a headline declaring that Trump’s claim had “no evidence.” ABC News declared it “baseless,” NPR went with “unfounded.” Politico called it a “fringe conspiracy theory.” Those news outlets whose headlines about the tweet did not contain the word “false” were criticized for failing their responsibility to exercise journalistic scrutiny.
The Washington Post swiftly sicced its top fact-checker on Trump. Glenn Kessler denounced Trump’s “bogus claim.” Kessler gave Trump a lecture on the importance of credibility, writing that since Trump was now “on the verge of becoming president, he needs to be more careful about making wild allegations with little basis in fact, especially if the claim emerged from a handful of tweets and conspiracy-minded websites.” Should Trump persist in wildly distorting the truth, he “will quickly find that such statements will undermine his authority on other matters.”
The media demanded to know where Trump had come up with such a ridiculous notion. The day after the tweet, Trump spokesman Jason Miller was asked by NPR whether there was any evidence to support the idea that millions of people had voted illegally. But surprisingly enough, Miller did have a source: The Washington Post.
In 2014, under the headline “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” the Post had run a piece from two social scientists, Jesse Richman and David Earnest, suggesting that illegal voting by non-citizens could be regularly occurring, and could even be prevalent enough to tip elections. As they wrote:
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
Richman and Earnest’s thesis was extremely controversial, and was so heavily criticized that the Post ultimately published a note preceding the article, pointing out that many objections to the work had been made. But the Post never actually retracted or withdrew the piece. It was ironic, then, that when Trump tweeted about millions of illegal voters, the Washington Post’s fact-checker chastised him for relying on “conspiracy-minded websites.” After all, the conspiracy-minded website in question was the Post itself.
After Trump’s spokesman pointed out that the tweet was consistent with assertions from the Washington Post’s own website, the newspaper’s fact-checking department became extremely defensive. They awarded Miller’s statement an additional “four Pinnochios.” Without actually linking to the Post’s original article about voting by non-citizens, fact-checker Michelle Yee Hee Lee tried to claim that the study wasn’t really in the Washington Post. Instead, she said, it: “was published two years ago in the Monkey Cage, a political-science blog hosted by The Washington Post. (Note to Trump’s staff members: This means you can’t say The Washington Post reported this information; you have to cite the Monkey Cage blog.)”