Am I Imagining This?<br />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,<br />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?<br />But in this time of President Trump’s almost daily "fake news" accusations against The New York Times,<br />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.<br />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<br />that are doing their jobs: holding his authority to account and bearing witness to his acts.<br />I’ve never seen anything like it." We’ve never seen anything like it<br />because when hundreds of millions of Americans are connected, anyone, clueless or not, can disseminate what they like with a click.<br />We’ve had fake news accounts of how Hillary Clinton paid $62 million to Beyoncé<br />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.<br />Hordes of journalists scurry to disprove "X." He moves on, never to mention it again, or claims<br />that he did not say it, or insists that what he really said was "Y." People begin to wonder: Am I imagining this?
