Fake news: It’s time for news anchors to quit their acting side jobs

With trust in mainstream media at record lows, it may be time for journalists to stop blurring the line between fact and fiction, writes Richard Hall.

Rachel Maddow appears as herself in an episode of House of Cards (Screengrab: Netflix)

During his four years in power, Donald Trump waged a relentless campaign to delegitimise the press. He called them liars and fakes almost daily and encouraged his supporters to do the same. Any mistake or misstep was seized upon as proof of malign intent.

Cable news anchors were frequently on the receiving ends of those attacks, often for no other reason than they were the most visible targets. It was they who most often delivered the news of whatever scandal was unearthed to the president through his favourite medium.

Given the existential battle for legitimacy that was forced on them by the Trump presidency, and which lingers still, the practice of those same anchors acting as themselves in TV dramas and movies seems all the more strange.

You’ll likely have seen them appearing as themselves in a fictional news broadcast written into the movie or TV show. Sometimes they will deliver the news to fit in with the narrative, other times they will exchange dialogue with the actors, becoming a fictional version of themselves for a moment.

Larry King was one of the most prolific of the actor-anchors. His IMDB page shows 66 acting credits to his name, beginning in 1984 with an appearance in Ghostbusters. Of the current top five cable news anchors today, Lawrence O’Donnell leads the pack with 21 acting credits (although it’s important to note that he was an actor before he was an anchor). MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has 10, Sean Hannity has three, as does his Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson.

The years leading up to Trump’s election were heady times for the anchor actors. All the major networks were represented in the second season of the political drama House of Cards, broadcast in 2014: Kelly O’Donnell from NBCNews, Ashleigh Banfield of CNN, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes from MSNBC, to name a few. In one scene, Maddow moderates and engages in a debate about the corrupt fictional Democratic president with two characters from the show. It was a similarly packed house in 2016’s Batman vs Superman, which starred Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien and Charlie Rose.

Fox News, MSNBC and CNN did not respond to a request for comment on their policies for allowing news anchors to act in dramas.

What does it say about the state of American news that anchors are so adept at switching between these two worlds? In the UK, regulation of broadcast news ensures that anchors are impartial — their opinions, their personalities even, are hidden. In the US, the opposite is true. A news anchor’s success depends on their ability to engage and rile their audience. They deliver long, impassioned monologues to camera every night.   

Just a few years ago, these acting appearances were seen as mostly harmless, just a useful tool for writers to help their viewers suspend disbelief. But in the years since, should those calculations change? Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, was among those sounding the alarm even before Trump’s election victory. Today, he’s even more resolute.

“We’re in a period where the very real estate of truth and facts are being called into question, so why muddy the waters?” he tells The Independent.

“We’re seeing them doing exactly what they do every night when they are reporting the news, we’re seeing them do it in a completely fictional situation, reporting something that didn’t happen. Most people are fully capable of making that distinction, but especially in the environment now where everyone is hyper sensitised to the news and its accuracy, if I was in charge of a news organisation I would completely shut this down,” he adds.   

Professor Thompson points out that the practice is not a particularly new phenomenon. Even Walter Cronkite, the legendary newsman known as “the most trusted man in America,” appeared as himself in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But he argues that it made more sense back then: there were only a few news shows and a few anchors, news was less partisan, so an anchor could “represent” the news without causing distrust. Things have changed.

“I would think that since 2016 there has been more of a reason to be really careful. Many people are going to call you fake news no matter what, but you don’t want to give them ammunition.” he says, “especially since this is such a noble calling, and is so important to the healthy operation of government.”

The change over the last four years cannot be overstated. The Trump presidency coincided with and fuelled a dramatic decline in trust of the mainstream media.

The most common two-word phrase in Mr Trump’s infamous Twitter feed during his presidency was “fake news.” He uttered the phrase more than 2,000 times in some form throughout his time in the White House, usually reacting to a news story that painted him in a bad light.

Throughout that same time, Mr Trump peddled lies and half-truths and promoted dangerous conspiracy theories. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker counted a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims over his four years in power.

His delegitimisation campaign was enormously effective, at least among his supporters.  Republicans who say they have trust in the mass media declined from 32 per cent in 2015 to 10 per cent in 2020, according to an annual tracking poll conducted by Gallup since 1972.

Trump’s rhetoric was a key reason for that decline. “I call the fake news now corrupt news because fake news isn’t tough enough,” he said during an appearance at the Oval Office, while claiming credit for creating the term. “And I’m the one that came up with the term. I’m very proud of it.”

Mr Trump’s term also contributed to a blurring of the boundaries of reality. The distortion of facts from the top encouraged the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory, adherents of which believe that secret cabal of Satan-worshipping liberal paedophiles run the world, and that Mr Trump would destroy it. He refused to disavow the movement, saying publicly that they “love America” and stating, “I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

It would be crude to suggest that anchors who appeared as actors were responsible for the rise in distrust. But at a time when they face an almost daily battle to deliver the news to an increasingly distrustful population, does it really make sense to continue blurring those lines between truth and fiction? In this toxic environment, can they so easily flip a switch to tell the audience when to trust them and when to suspend disbelief?