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Emily Maitlis: When #alternativefacts become like Orwell’s #doubleplusgood

On the attack: Press Secretary Sean Spicer: REUTERS
On the attack: Press Secretary Sean Spicer: REUTERS

“I have a running war with the media,” President Trump declared on his first day in office. And that much, we can safely say, is true. But what came next — in a speech to the CIA at Langley — quite simply was not. “They made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community,” he said, reminding us of his claim that the CIA had leaked the compromising dossier about him. Remember that tweet?

“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

He then accused the papers of manipulating photographs to make it seem as if his inauguration had not drawn many people. “We caught them in a beauty,” said the President. “They’re going to pay a big price”.

Size matters when you’re Donald Trump. And he perceived the photograph as a slight. And that hurt. He then sent forth the man who may be the world’s unluckiest press secretary, Sean Spicer, to spread the word that his inaugural crowd had bettered President Obama’s in 2009. Spicer attacked his new role with vigour, telling a White House briefing room: “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong”.

George Orwell’s Minitrue could not have put it better. When history is wrong, it needs rewriting. This, let me remind you, was on day one. Those searching for meaning want to believe that what sounded like rampant, clinical narcissism was in fact Trump’s way of diverting the news cycle from the (record-breaking) Women’s March on Washington going on right on their doorstep. Perhaps.

But maybe the real question now is how those of us listening to the lies respond. So much centres around the question of “balance”. So weaponised, so overused. Thrown in our faces when we strive to say anything that reaches past a seesaw of “yes and no”.

Of course the natural instinct is to report the statement in its entirety — then reach to the other side for reaction. But that doesn’t work when you are the other side: something as amorphous as the media itself. Nor should it have to work, when a statement is so easily, demonstrably untrue. Our priority, uncomfortable as it sounds, is not one of balance but of fairness. We are not being fair to our readers or our viewers if we know something to be untrue and we simply fail to say it.

At the weekend The New York Times reported Trump’s claims as “falsehoods”. It was a gentle word. But it did what few other papers felt able to do: it told its readers the difference between fact and fiction — backed up, in this case, by a scientist and expert in crowd control who had studied both the Obama inauguration and the Trump inauguration to compare numbers (Obama’s he declared to be much larger).

It is unedifying to be in a position where the media is “fighting back” against the democratically elected leader, on his first day in office. But the alternative is worse: to become a voice cowed by a sense of neutrality or decency — into not doing its job. Words matter in a presidency. And the President took an oath of allegiance not to the media but to the country.

We are lucky — yes, lucky — to have a President who still insists on tweeting. And long may we encourage him to do so. Those 140 characters may provide the best way of reminding him what he once said.