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22nd Jun 2020

Why publishing fake news works for Donald Trump

Oli Dugmore

Fake news works

It is an unfortunate fact of modern political life that the truth, quite simply, does not really matter anymore. It does for some people, of course, but for a large number how they perceive the world is a lot more important than cold hard facts.

Within this sort of world, it becomes easy for politicians to spread disinformation which both makes them appear to be doing a better job than they actually are or, better yet, distract entirely from the job they’re doing.

Donald Trump probably had this in mind when he shared a doctored video claiming to show a CNN news report about a ‘racist’ white baby chasing away a black child.

The chyron, which was poorly created on Photoshop and contains misspellings, stated that the white baby was ‘probably a Trump supporter’.

This video was quickly found to be fake, due to the fact that it in fact a video from last year showing two toddler friends greeting each other on the footpath before running off together.

But that doesn’t matter, because if you support Trump you like it, and if you don’t, he’s still got you talking about something other than the fact that he is leading the country with the highest number of Covid-19 deaths.