H.L. Mencken on Fake News

The sage of Baltimore's views on the abyss of modern journalism 100 years ago ring even more true today

Nearly all of the leading shibboleths of the left are collapsing or are in retreat under the onslaught of Donald Trump’s counter-revolution of common sense, including racism, genderfication, wokism in general, and especially the climate cult. Just this week the South Coast Air Quality Management District in southern California, who for decades have seldom seen a green mandate or regulation they didn’t like, rejected a proposal long in development that would have phased out residential gas-powered water heaters and furnaces in the Los Angeles basin. Environmental groups got a major case of the sads over it:

Chis Chavez, deputy policy director with the environmental group Coalition for Clean Air, gave impassioned comments to the board after the vote. “Simply put, you have failed,” Chavez said, raising his voice to the board members.

Raising his voice!

Then there’s the awful flood in Texas. On cue, the climate cultists and their media stenographers wheeled into action: the cause of this dramatic flood was climate change, and the ineffective government response is to be blamed on Trump and evil Republicans for cutting the budget and staff for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Amazing how budget cuts that don’t take effect until October 1 can somehow affect a government agency in early July.

In any case, the media ran with “news” that wasn’t true:

For once, the Associated Press, usually reliable for the party line of the left, corrected the record:

In fact NOAA and the NWS gave their first warning about possible extreme weather on Wednesday, two days before the storm hit, issued a severe storm warning 12 hours before the storm hit, and a flash flood warning three hours before the Guadalupe River started rising. But the flash flood warning came in the middle of the night, and Texas officials were slow to react and get the word out, or people didn’t receive word or heed it. None of these facts mattered to the media, which had their usual pre-determined story line to “report.”

And naturally the New York Times also runs with the party line that climate change is making such storms worse and more frequent:

Colossal bursts of rain like the ones that caused the deadly flooding in Texas are becoming more frequent and intense around the globe as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, scientists say. . .

Across Texas, the intensity of extreme rain could increase another 10 percent by 2036, according to a report last year by John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist.

Of course, what the Times doesn’t tell you—likely because it doesn’t know—is that the report cited is based on the IPCC RCP8.5 scenario (IYKYK, and if you don’t, don’’t bother), which is so extreme and implausible that even the IPCC has backed away from it. In other words, it is crap.

And that data also don’t support this narrative. Even the EPA shows declining flooding in the very area in Texas hit by this storm:

See also:

Um. . .

Now, quite by chance and seemingly (though not actually) unrelated to this item, I ran across an account of Franklin Roosevelt attending the Gridiron Dinner in Washington DC in December 1934. That’s the dinner where journalists and politicians exchange good natured barbs at one another. The account I read, from Greg Mitchell’s Campaign of the Century (more about this book another time) relates that H.L. Mencken was present and delivered some good natured remarks, but that Roosevelt “delivered an uncharacteristically bitter assault on the American press, claiming it was shot through with ‘stupidity, cowardice and philistinism’ and staffed by reporters ‘who do not know what a symphony is, or streptococcus. . .’”

Sounds like something Trump would say if he attended the Gridiron, which he sensibly declines to do.

But the narrative continues: “With growing pleasure the audience realized that the President was quoting from Mencken’s [1927] essay ‘Journalism in America.’”

So naturally I ran to my Mencken collection and found the essay, which I had marked up from reading more than 30 years ago. Amazingly, Mencken was on to “fake news” 90 years before Trump, and his description then applies fully to our age of fake news today:

What journalism chiefly suffers from today is the lack of alert and competent professional journalism. . . For the most part, the journalistic quacks and incompetents suffer no challenge whatever. . .

The fake news that pours from such centers of controversy as Russia or China is not ordered by Wall Street, nor even by the dull Babbitts who now own the majority of papers. It is ordered by managing editors who are professionally incompetent to get better—which is to say, by men who are unequal to the demands of their jobs. They know very well that news fakers swarm in such places. . .

Today those “news fakers” are the agency officials, liberal activist groups, and other leftist agenda-journalists, practicioners of what Daniel Boorstin later called purveyors of “pseudo-events,” that the mainstream media swallow whole. Every time.

To continue with Mencken:

Of late every reflective American reader must have noticed the inaccuracy and imbecility of most of the special correspondence issuing from Washington. In it all the frauds, high and low, who flourish in that town are treated with the utmost gravity, and their cheapest and most venal maneuvers are depicted as masterpieces of statecraft. Is this bilge ordered by Wall Street? I doubt it. Is it demanded by the customers of the papers that print it? Again I have a doubt. Far easier and more plausible is the explanation that the Washington correspondents write it willingly and in good faith—that they are too stupid to penetrate the fraudulencies by which they are surrounded.

How little has changed since Mencken wrote this.

H.L. Mencken