Unpacking Vivek Ramaswamy’s ‘media hoaxes’ meme

In the battle over how reality is presented, the media is disadvantaged in multiple ways.

One is that the media self-corrects, offering transparency to readers about errors in its reporting. An effect of this is that it becomes trivial to sift through the thousands of stories written each month to find mistakes — and then compile such mistakes to suggest that errors are rampant.

This sort of accountability seems to be increasingly uncommon, particularly in the era of Donald Trump. The former president, counseling a friend, once told him that “if you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead,” according to reporting from Bob Woodward. The context was that the friend was accused of what Woodward delicately calls “some bad behavior toward women,” but Trump’s advice — “deny, deny, deny” — certainly encapsulates his own approach to mistakes. If you never admit mistakes, every mistake is contestable.

This overlaps with another disadvantage for the media. Because the media is interested in accurately reporting events (which is why our mistakes are admitted), those who find that reality inconvenient view it with hostility. The rise of outlets for information that aren’t similarly committed, such as sharply partisan blogs or major cable news channels, helps reinforce a universe in which false claims are presented as truth and vice versa.

This universe is centered on the political right, expanded by Trump’s rise to power. And that means that the true claims presented by the media are seen as partisan attacks and that the media is seen as an arm of a leftist elite, partnered nefariously with others who disagree with the right’s worldview.

On Thursday, fading GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy offered an example of the sort of attack that results, listing examples in which — he seems to argue — the media was not just wrong but intentionally so, to hurt the right.

The thing about the list, though, is that it is a mishmash of vague claims and misinformation. Since similar lists circulate with regularity, it’s worth explaining how that’s the case.

The list begins with “Russia collusion.” By itself, it’s noteworthy that many of the things on Ramaswamy’s list use shorthands to refer to allegations understood by his heavily right-wing base. Readers are expected to just know what he means because many of the things on the list have been reshaped and reiterated for so long that they are taken as articles of faith.

What does “Russia collusion” mean? Probably, what Trump means by it: that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential connections to Trump was shown to be baseless.

But no matter how often Trump and his allies insist that it was, it wasn’t. I wrote about this in 2022 at length, but the rebuttal is easily distilled. The interference effort was real, there were multiple points of contact between Russian actors and Trump’s campaign, and Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s attempts to boost his candidacy. At one point, his campaign manager gave internal polling data to someone linked to Russian intelligence.

A review found that the investigation itself was warranted. The probe culminated in a report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that is worth reviewing, as it fell far short of exonerating Trump.

But Trump started calling the whole thing a hoax even before he fired FBI Director James B. Comey, and, from that point forward, it’s how the probe has been treated by the right.

Next on Ramaswamy’s list is “The Hunter Biden laptop story.” Again, that’s vague and, again, it simply plays on the sense on the right that something untoward occurred surrounding the October 2020 emergence of material purportedly obtained from a laptop once owned by President Biden’s son.

Over time, a few criticisms of the initial response to the story have emerged, like that former intelligence officials said it was Russian disinformation. They didn’t; they said the material’s release bore “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The skeptical response from news organizations and social media companies has been similarly pilloried, but there was good reason for caution to be applied in the moment.

This skepticism has at times been assigned not to caution about elevating hacked material (which was the actual reason) but to the media’s supposed efforts to aid Biden’s campaign. There’s no reason to think that handling the story differently would have affected the outcome in 2020.

Ramaswamy’s list then gets to “Charlottesville.” This is presumably a reference to Trump’s comments about the violence that unfolded there in August 2017, with the then-president stating during a news conference that there “were very fine people, on both sides.” This came a few days after his initial response, in which he denounced the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence — on many sides. On many sides.” That comment earned Trump praise from white nationalists.

As The Washington Post Fact Checker noted during the 2020 election, Trump did couch his “fine people” claim by denouncing explicit racists. (The White House had already offered a statement to that effect, and Trump had previously read prepared remarks that did the same.) But there’s no evidence that the right-wing protesters in Charlottesville that day included any significant number of non-White nationalist or -militia participants.

Ramaswamy’s list then runs through several stories that were more cultural: “Bubba Wallace,” “Jussie Smollett” and “Covington Catholic Kids.”

Wallace is a NASCAR driver who, soon after social justice protests began in 2020, was informed about the discovery of a rope shaped like a noose in the garage housing his car. It was ultimately determined that the incident was not a hate crime and that the rope had been there for months.

Jussie Smollett was an actor who claimed to have been assaulted by right-wing assailants in a racist and homophobic attack, a story that was also picked up by the media. He was later convicted of having made the story up.

In both those cases, the media reported the stories and their developments. It’s a good example of how reporting on something that turns out to be different than originally thought is used as a cudgel against the press.

The Covington Catholic story, on the other hand, was an example of how the presentation of a story by the media proved to be inaccurate. An encounter between a high school student wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and a Native American man was initially represented in a way that suggested that the student was mocking the other man. Other videos showed that he wasn’t. Corrections were added to numerous stories, including at The Washington Post.

We can dispatch the other items on Ramaswamy’s list more quickly.

“Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.” Ramaswamy’s inclusion of news that Michigan’s governor was the target of a violent plot hinges on the right’s belief that this was contrived and that those arrested as part of the plot were entrapped by the federal government. Several of those involved in the plan were convicted by a jury; several others took plea deals in which they admitted guilt.

“COVID Lab leak was a ‘conspiracy theory.’ ” This is another example of cherry-picking news stories to disparage the media broadly. The Post explored how initial coverage of the emergence of the coronavirus was at times overly dismissive of the idea that it might have originated in a lab. Again, corrections were made by several news outlets, including The Post.

Ramaswamy focuses on the “conspiracy theory” angle here, unlike Trump, who has claimed without evidence that the virus did originate in a lab. It is useful politically for him and his allies to elevate this idea because it implies that fault for American deaths lies with China — and because it allows them to again cast the media as nefarious.

“Steele dossier.” Here, Ramaswamy is presumably referring to the elevation of unverified claims about Trump and Russia that captivated the left early in Trump’s presidency. The right has often tried to claim that these unverified allegations were the trigger for the Russia probe, but they weren’t.

Most reporters, in fact, treated the dossier as what it was: rumors, and dubious ones. But the chatter about the documents from opinion writers and commentators overwhelmed that caution.

“Don’t Say Gay was in the bill.” Ramaswamy is referring to legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis limiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools in Florida. It was often called the “don’t say gay” bill because of those limits. Media outlets often referred to it using that descriptor — e.g., the “so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill” — since that was how it was often known among the public.

The bill didn’t say “don’t say gay” or explicitly ban use of the term “gay.” It did impose bans on some instruction about LGBTQ+ identities.

“Migrant ‘kids In cages.’ ” Ramaswamy is waving toward criticism of Trump’s family-separation policy for immigrants and, presumably, the counterargument that the chain-link enclosures in which they were housed had been used during the Obama administration. Either way, the Trump administration did demonstrably house kids in those enclosures and did demonstrably separate some from their parents. Among those who called the enclosures “cages” was Trump himself.

“GA election integrity was the new ‘Jim crow.’ ” This is a useful inclusion from Ramaswamy as the claim is obviously commentary; there’s no way to present such a statement as factual. Arguing that the media is biased based on opinion articles is self-evidently silly.

“Duke lacrosse kids.” I originally misremembered this assertion, thinking that Ramaswamy was referring to a retracted article from Rolling Stone that was published a decade ago. But a reader pointed out that this story instead referred to an earlier accusation in which the media drew attention to assault claims that were eventually dismissed in court. Like the Smollett incident, the critique is more about the media’s elevation of the story than the facts of it.

“Zelensky is a paragon of democracy.” The only example I can find of the Ukrainian president being called a “paragon of democracy” is from Ramaswamy.

“Jan 6.” Another code word meant to evoke a general sense of distrust. Ramaswamy has in the past embraced claims about the unsubstantiated role of federal actors in the violence at the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot — claims that thrive in the right-wing media hothouse because they absolve Trump of culpability. But there’s no question that the events that day were a function of Trump’s actions and encouragement. Multiple plea deals from riot participants have made that even more obvious than it was at the time. Claims that government actors had a role, meanwhile, have been consistently debunked.

“ ‘Peaceful’ BLM riots.” There were unquestionably Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 that devolved into violence. But research has shown that the vast majority of those protests were peaceful.

“Ivermectin is a horse dewormer.” It is, as well as being a treatment used by people. It has not, to Ramaswamy’s intended point, been shown to be effective against covid-19.

“Trump used tear gas to clear a crowd for a bible photo.” This is one of my favorite examples of how the right insists that the media manipulated a story. No one said that Trump himself used tear gas to clear a square near the White House in June 2020 shortly before he crossed it to pose for photos outside a nearby church. But tear gas was used, apparently by D.C. police.

They were working in conjunction with federal law enforcement to clear the area shortly before Trump headed to the church. That’s the real question: Was the area being cleared to facilitate Trump’s trip, making the use of that tear gas a function of his actions?

The former president’s allies claim that it wasn’t, pointing to an inspector general report looking at the actions of the federal U.S. Park Police. They note that the area was slated to be cleared anyway, to put up new barriers.

But it was cleared at that useful moment only after then-Attorney General William P. Barr talked to officials at the scene.

“Are these people still going to be here when POTUS comes out?” he asked. The efforts to clear the square started soon after — apparently, the answer was “no.”

Those are facts, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them are obvious. But Ramaswamy and his ideological allies have decided that those conclusions are a mark not of Trump’s dishonesty but, instead, the media’s. Because, for them, it is more useful to present the media as bad actors than to present their allies in that light.

“The MSM spits in the face of *the people* every single day,” Ramaswamy insisted in his social media post, “with ad nauseam and flagrant lies.”

When your collection of daily insults includes 18 examples that stretch back over some 3,000 days, perhaps the dishonest party here isn’t the press.