Sex, lies and vitriol: Fake news that handed Trump a real victory

If British Prime Minister Theresa May succeeds in luring US president-elect Donald Trump over for a state visit to London, spare a thought for the courtier who has to brief Queen Elizabeth on her guest's interests.

There's money: he likes, in his own words, to "grab, grab, grab". Then women: he "loves" women so much that he bought the Miss Universe contest. And then there's the former MI6 officer's dossier, the Russian call girls, the videotape and the Moscow hotel.

Her Majesty might be forgiven for wondering if the palace should prepare for a rather lively evening.

But what is she - or any of us - to believe? The first rule of the Trump era is that nothing is so strange that it can't become stranger still. This week we saw the publication of a dossier reporting rumours about Russian attempts to blackmail him.

The claim is that he was offered money, which failed, but that a traditional honeytrap succeeded. And we know this how? Because someone told someone, who told someone else, who told an ex-MI6 officer hired by Trump's opponents to collect dirt to destroy him.

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Corroborated by no one. The dossier had the hallmarks of what our foreign secretary might call an inverted pyramid of piffle.

I had tuned into Trump's press conference hoping to see him being mauled by the press. Instead, I watched in horrified admiration as he turned all of this to his advantage, reminding us why he won the election. His enemies loathe him and invariably go too far.

This time, the claims of spies, hookers, videotapes and Kremlin blackmail were easy to ridicule. Typical, he said, of the stories being concocted to defame him. "Sick people" made this stuff up. Journalism unworthy of the name.

He was right. The Moscow dossier should never have been published. Such material finds its way to journalists all the time and no substance is filthier than the grist of the political rumour mill. Sometimes it's true. More often, it's nonsense.

But most stories fall under the category of well-known rumours no one has been able to prove, probably because they're nonsense. Tales of prime ministers and pigs' heads, of archbishops and Soho dungeons, of ministers and mistresses. To publish such claims without corroboration isn't journalism but something else.

Those seeking to spread poison in Westminster have long known that the "gutter press" is no such thing, that newspapers are picky in the gossip they print. When Damian McBride was advising former prime minister Gordon Brown, he thought of a way around this: feeding a website that would, without qualm, publish dark gossip about Tories to "destabilise" them.

Rumours about their past, their wives, or suggestions that videos existed of them engaged in acts of debauchery. Online publication, McBride thought, could be justified because he was passing on gossip that was "doing the rounds". When he was caught cooking up this plan, he resigned.

The Trump Moscow dossier was published on the same indefensible rationale: that it had been doing the rounds. BuzzFeed, a website specialising in stories with headlines like "27 Tumblr Posts That Will Make You Laugh, I Promise", said people could read the dossier and make up their own minds. In other words: it hadn't been able to prove the allegations but published them anyway.

block_quotes_start If newspapers won't touch a dossier that looks too dodgy, there's probably a website that will block_quotes_end

The tragedy, for BuzzFeed, is that it has been trying to make its name in serious journalism - yet has now made an error so large that Trump can use it against all of the press. An egregious example, he says, of "fake news".

The phrase "fake news" was deployed by Trump's critics, a label for false online stories that circulated during the presidential campaign - claiming, for example, that he had been endorsed by the pope.

Now, as so often, Trump is taking a weapon aimed at him and turning it against his enemies - with greater effect. The dossier gave him an excuse to stop taking questions from CNN ("You're fake news," he told its reporter) and something to hold up as proof of what he so often calls a "dishonest media" conspiring against him.

Had a British newspaper published the Moscow dossier, the repercussions would have been as swift and harsh as they would be deserved - from readers and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the regulator.

But it's hard to expect much from websites without much of a reputation to lose. In this case, the US newspapers, several of which have known about the dossier for several weeks, ended up following an agenda set by their online rivals. This doesn't do much for the quality of national debate but it is, none the less, the direction in which things are heading.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin understands the new media dynamics, and how easy it is to cause mayhem in Western democracies by dropping misleading information in the right place. If the Kremlin heard a former MI6 agent was gathering a file to destroy Trump, why not feed in some duff information?

And if newspapers won't touch a dossier that looks too dodgy, there's probably a website that will. If all this were a film, it would end with a triumphant Putin cackling with glee at having sown mistrust and division between the new president and his intelligence agencies.

A president-elect who spent the election campaign chastising the media for true stories now has a fake one to complain about.

A press conference intended to focus on his business interests was eclipsed by his mocking a plot that sounds like a mixture between John le Carré and a Carry On film.

BuzzFeed now admits that it knew at least some of the details in the dossier were wrong, and that it can't say which - if any - are right. Trump is emerging from this debacle looking almost - almost - presidential.

This week, the first of 3,500 US troops arrived in Poland to reinforce the Nato presence there. China is asserting itself in the Pacific and the US national debt is heading to $20-trillion (about R270-trillion).

These issues are not being discussed as US politics disappears into a vortex of online fury and Trump mocks the media from the moral high ground.

It's hard to think of a president less suited to the job. But it's also hard to think of one luckier in his enemies.