Sharyl Attkisson - Slanted

With love and gratitude to my friends, family, attorneys, and my other partners in truth.

Some of the proceeds from Slanted are being donated to the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, and other good journalism and anti-censorship causes. The content of this book is based on my own opinions, experiences, and observations. Some quotes contained within are based on my best recollections of the events and, in each instance, accurately reflect the spirit and my sense of the conversations.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Unknown

Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

The Obsolete Man

In George Orwells dystopian novel 1984, the hapless protagonist, Winston Smith, is a government records editor at the Ministry of Truthwhich is a job thats all about lies.

Poor Winstons assignment is to painstakingly rewrite history in real time. Revise old newspaper stories to make them line up with the ruling political partys current version of the truth. Its a job that never ends. History must constantly be altered because one lie inevitably necessitates another. And the needs of Big Brotherthe dictator in this totalitarian societyrequire that a position declared one day be erased and forgotten the next.

To accomplish its goal, Big Brother mandates the destruction of all paper records. The citizenry must deposit any surviving documents into memory holes, never to be referenced again. There isnt any real newsonly that which the powerful decide people should hear and believe: the censored, curated, and sanitized.

Today, were in an Orwellian environment that has taken this frightening scenario a step further. Big Brother constantly revised facts to fit the governments ever-changing story. The modern media have also discovered how to carefully filter information on the front end to make sure that only the correct view is presented in the first place. That way, the story never has to change.

Right now, as you read these words, versions of history and current events are being written and revised in real time according to what powerful interests wish them to say. Our memory hole is found in growing efforts to curate or censor information on the news, ban certain facts, declare selected viewpoints illegitimate, cleanse social media of particular accounts, and judge people and events of the distant past using todays evolving and controversial standards.

Even those who know better are left, like Winston Smith, to guess and wonder how many others like them are out therehow many of the unindoctrinated who dont buy the spin? Theres certainly no way to find out by clicking on different Internet articles or flipping among cable news channels.

This giant purge of knowledge and facts wouldnt be possible without the news media. We in the media have, to a frightening degree, gotten on board with the efforts to convince the public that they do not need or deserve access to all information, only that which powerful interests see fit for them to have.

Reporters are so aware of this that they have a name for it: The Narrative. The phrase is used to describe what we caught others doing to try to shape the news. Now were doing it ourselves.

The Narrative refers to a story line that influential people want told in order to define and narrow your views. The goal of The Narrative is to embed chosen ideas so deeply within society that they are no longer questionedscratch thatso that questions are not permitted.

Slanted tells the story of what happens when reporters convince news consumers that the reporters own opinions are more valuable than facts. With an information universe at our fingertips on the news and Internet and with propagandists working overtime to shape it, many people ask what they can believe. Journalists are more than happy to tell them. Unfortunately, the journalists are too often driven by propaganda, as well.

The goal of this book is to help you expose and defeat narratives even when they are cleverly executed by the most powerful sources using the most sophisticated methods. It will also reveal how the business of narratives is inextricably linked to the death of the news as we once knew it.

I will anatomize a series of narratives that have dominated even in the face of contradictory facts. Anyone accused of sexual harassment must be guilty if there are enough accusers, no matter how flimsy the claims may be. Donald Trump is too cowardly to visit the troops in a war zone. When mass shootings occur in certain cities, they must be called something else. Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election. All new polling spells doom for Republicans. And many more.

The point is that The Narrative is guiding what facts you get to learn about. Facts that serve The Narrative are deemed to be news. Facts that dont are not news. Or are to be obliterated.

To begin with, a narrative almost always presents multisided issues in a distinctly one-sided fashion. Any notion of logic is suspended. The standards and judgments applied to the target being smeared by a narrative are never applied to those advancing the narrative or their allies. For example, someone pushing a narrative might accuse his target of lying or being hateful or racist. At the same time, the one doing the accusing may be lying or acting in a hateful or racist waybut no attention is given to the hypocrisy. People simply pretend to not notice. Youll see a lot of real-life examples in this book.

You might think that a defining characteristic of a narrative is that it is false. But thats often not the case. Here are three ways in which truthful information can also qualify as narratives.

First, when truthful information is deliberately presented in a biased fashion in order to confuse, drown out, or overwhelm other facts and to advance a particular goal. For example, it may be true that a mass killer used a gun. But news reports about the crime serve a narrative if they are overwhelmingly shaded to the exclusion of counterpoints in order to make an argument for gun control.

Second, truthful information can qualify as a narrative when it is amplified beyond its independent news value in order to promote a broader story line. For example, it may be true that former first lady Hillary Clinton stumbled when descending a set of stairs. But news reports on such an incident serve a narrative if they become front-page headlines and a trending topic on social media to imply, absent other hard evidence, that Clintons stumble proves shes seriously ill.

And third, the truth can become a narrative when it is couched in terms that present an issue as a closed case never to be reopened or implies that contrary facts and views are illegitimate. For example, there may be a good reason to discuss the frequency of tornadoes or rising floodwaters theoretically in terms of global warming. But the discussion becomes a narrative if news analysts link every weather phenomenon to man-made climate change, as if it is a fact, with little consideration given to scientific counterpoints.

Once a narrative is successfully established, a great deal of effort must be put into cultivating it. Contrary views, facts, and science must be shoved down the memory holedisappearedas though they had never existed.

Accomplishing this propaganda feat in the information age requires a great deal of coordination. That includes campaigns to convince the public at large to embrace the once unthinkable notion that their news should be curated by third parties. It includes well-funded media literacy efforts to brainwasher, teachus and our children whom to believe and whom to tune out. It includes infiltrating our universities and public schools. It includes proposing laws that promote censorship and turn free speech on its head, creating policies that result in narrowing the universe of available information, and plain old bullying of those who dont obediently dance in step behind the appointed Pied Piper.