Trump’s Ministry of Information
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug.6, 2025
Working as a news editor in three newsrooms for a living, a lot of effort went into reminding reporters of the importance of double-checking information and looking to trusted sources for verification of what they were hearing.
Yes, I killed news stories that failed to verify assertions or sent reporters even in pre-Google days to check storerooms of articles and source information.
I supervised degreed, trained researchers who offered such verification to journalists — especially when sourcing might prove touchy or difficult. My favorite supervising editor would send post-publication notes in green ink about avoidable error reminding all that search engines now were making verification available in a few seconds.
Court and various legal documents were high on those source lists, as were statistical reports from government agencies, foundation studies, peer reviewed information.
Now Donald Trump is stomping in, and without evidence of misdoing, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a monthly report that raises questions about his economic boasts.
Basically the clear message is that information needs to be supportive of his often arbitrary, overstated and incorrect summaries whether about economics, immigration, crime, health, or even the weather. This is the same Trump that tried to move a hurricane’s effect by hundreds of miles with a Sharpie circle on a map or who insists on overblown crowd sizes.
Trump says the Labor bureau, which collects employments information from businesses across the country, even if belatedly, is using “rigged” data. There has been a large reaction that in doing so, Trump is undercutting the perceived validity of U.S. data on all sorts of activity from economics to health, and that is true.
From a personal view over years’ worth of reports, not a single month’s report, my view is that these gross calculations about economic trends may be off in certain specifics. But month to month, they are off in the same way. So they are used most usefully as a guide for change rather than as a census of specific jobs, for example. What we ought to be interested in mathematically are trends.
One can argue about the individual components of the monthly consumer price index, but it is the comparative general movement up or down that is a gauge for inflation. There are similar survey measures of productivity or gross national product. There are more numbers collected by government than even Trump can make up or order others to skew.
Nevertheless, Trump is doing his best to blind any oversight or accountability by erasing or controlling data releases or dismissing employees who try to collect such information as a usable guide for White House policymaking.
Ignoring Fact Goes Cultural
In that context, consider the work of Washington Post reporter Geoffrey Fowler who followed up on what happed after Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg fired his fact-checkers essentially giving up on facts and truth.
Rather than pay fact-checkers, Zuckerberg opened posts for community comment, inviting volunteer contributors to weigh in on posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads when they saw a factual error. The process is a bit opaque, but if enough people write in on the same need for factual change, a notice is posted on the note.
It’s “truth” by vote, essentially.
Fowler volunteered to be a community comment moderator and tried to correct 65 posts over four months when he noticed errors. Only three won enough votes for acceptance, all about the Texas floods, not a political hot-button.
Note to self: Don’t rely on a Facebook post as verification, despite the Pew Research funding that 54 percent of Americans now say they rely on social media posts for news coverage.
Now Meta’s crowdsourcing approach to fact-checking is being picked up and copied by the other social media companies as a lesser-cost and responsibility-free way to avoid legal or popularity challenges.
Of course, at the White House, truth is being decided by a community of one — a guy whose own pervasive use of made-up alternative facts rules the day. It’s propaganda.
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