Am I Imagining This?
A recent New Yorker article by George Prochnik quoted the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig on Hitler’s savage reaction: "At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed." From a president who loathes the press, who insults the judiciary, who has no time for American ideals of liberty or democracy,
and whose predilection for violence is evident, what would be the reaction to a Reichstag fire in American guise — say a major act of terrorism?
But in this time of President Trump’s almost daily "fake news" accusations against The New York Times,
and of his counselor Kellyanne Conway’s "alternative facts," and of untruths seeping like a plague from the highest office in the land, there’s increasing talk of "real" or "fact-based" journalism.
Now we have President Trump suggesting that the real fake news is his negative polls — along with CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and any other news organizations
that are doing their jobs: holding his authority to account and bearing witness to his acts.
I’ve never seen anything like it." We’ve never seen anything like it
because when hundreds of millions of Americans are connected, anyone, clueless or not, can disseminate what they like with a click.
We’ve had fake news accounts of how Hillary Clinton paid $62 million to Beyoncé
and Jay Z to perform in Cleveland, and how Khizr Khan, the father of the Muslim American officer killed in Iraq, was an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hordes of journalists scurry to disprove "X." He moves on, never to mention it again, or claims
that he did not say it, or insists that what he really said was "Y." People begin to wonder: Am I imagining this?
