Much merriment was had on the internet last week when the Trump campaign unveiled a logo that looked like… well, we're all adults here so I'll spare the cute euphemisms — a penis entering an anus. The logo was subjected to endless innuendo-filled analysis from Wired to Samantha Bee, and then on Saturday, when a replacement logo was hurriedly unveiled, the whole thing started anew.

Logo-gate was a revealing episode of the modern click-bait media universe we now inhabit, in the sense the entire story was based on lies. The anus logo was never official, it had appeared in only one place, once — a single July 15 email from the "Make America Great Again Committee," which is a fundraising committee run jointly by, but nevertheless distinct from, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. The logo was never used on Trump's own website, nor, as The Hill noted, "anything sent directly by the Trump campaign," adding with uncomfortable understatement "it's unclear whether it was ever the official logo."

This lack of official status was immediately obvious to anyone who cared to give the thing three seconds of honest analysis, as opposed to the sarcastic sort, since it did not use the Trump campaign's trademark "Make America Great Again" font. The story nevertheless went viral because it passed the only journalistic test that matters these days: it told people something they wanted to be true.

A good rule of thumb in the year 2016 is to be deeply skeptical of any headline that seems to delight your liberal friends on Facebook. Chances are high it's total garbage.

We saw this most recently with the viral "Pokemon letter" story, in which a cantankerous open letter scolding players of Pokemon Go was presumed to be written by a bitter, old Conservative. An equally viral rebuttal letter even warned kids to steer clear of "members of the Conservative Party" and "Donald Trump."

Trouble is, the original letter was actually written by a 38-year old Vancouver hipster complete with fedora — who was worried about people stomping through his community kale garden. The fact he had awkwardly crammed no fewer than three left-wing talking points in his manefesto seemed to matter naught; progressives believe humorless scolds dwell entirely on the other side, so they ignored the counter-evidence sitting before their noses.

Or how about the time all those ignorant British rubes voted to leave the EU only to overwhelm Google with "what is the EU" searches the day after?

This anecdote was endlessly cited in high-minded pieces about the distressing rise of right-wing ignorance, but was backed by no hard evidence. While British Google searches asking for an EU definition had technically increased in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, a closer look at the numbers found such searches came from maybe about 1,000 people over the course of a few hours — in other words, utterly statistically irrelevant.

It was evocative of a similar non-story that had swept Canada weeks prior, in which the Trudeau government's much-ballyhooed rival of the long form census had allegedly caused the Census Canada website to crash under a tsunami of excited Canadians. As Lorrie Goldstein noted in the Toronto Sun, this was not remotely accurate interpretation of events — the site had crashed due to generic technological incompetence. Web traffic was actually down.

Or how about that bigoted woman in the Canada t-shirt who harassed that poor Muslim lady at an Ontario grocery store? The story was much-shared as a illustration of white trash gone wild, and proof of the much-reported, though rarely seen, Islamophobia surge that liberals insist is the real crime of Muslim terrorism. Ms. t-shirt is now on trial for assault, and thanks to the hardly in-depth reporting of The Rebel's Andrew Lawton, it's been revealed that the alleged assailant is probably a Muslim herself — she's an immigrant from Iran — and has significant mental health issues. The initial story did note that she spoke "an unknown language," which should have inspired at least some caution, but that's a lot to ask.

Bias in reporting used to be something subtle, but that was before social media and its ideology of sharability uber alles. We now see lazy, biased reporters going out of their way to ignore relevant facts, or avoid learning them in the first place, in order to write stories that tickle the brains of a narrow partisan audience and their friends on Facebook and Twitter. It's a clever strategy for an industry desperate for eyeballs, but it's certainly not journalism.

 

Written by J.J McCullough