Equities all around the world suffered big selloffs and safe haven demand soared as the Trump administration gets bombarded with an array of fake news coming out of the US media that are relying on anonymous sources without proof to derail the current administration. The market is right to be nervous as the world witnesses unprecedented determination from the same media houses that opposed to Trump Presidency during the campaign and came out firing with all they had to bring him down then and working again to bring down the current administration or clog it in such a manner that the key economic and geopolitical agendas fail to pass through congress.

We are sure that some people would argue the latest news coming out of the US media houses as not fake news; however, we do have some examples to show for our argument and its shows that fake news is not the biggest issue here; all media houses do get stories wrong from time to time but here what is going on is deliberate bombardment of fake news.

In the immediate aftermath of President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, an array of fake news got published in reputed media houses across the United States.

• On May 10, the Washington Post‘s Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, Sari Horwitz, and Robert Costa claimed that the deputy attorney General Rod Rosenstein has threatened to quit after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation. They cited anonymous sources for their claim. There were immense media attentions around the story and with attempts to defame Trump administration.
• Another accusation surfaced in Washington Post, written by Ashley Parker on the same day that the firing of Comey comes after he allegedly requested for more funds of the investigations of Trump-Russia collusion. It was again based on anonymous sources and pointed that the story was first published in New York Times.

In a press conference, Rod Rosenstein denied the claim saying that he has or had no intention to quit thus refuting the claims of those reporters. However, this story didn’t get adequate media attention and there was no proper journalistic approach to a story. Instead, it would seem that the purpose wasn’t to find any truth but to add to certain narratives.

Testifying before congress, the acting FBI director rejected the claims made by Ashley parker and not only said that the Russia investigation has adequate resources but pointed that FBI do not make funding requests to congress but justice department and FBI do not make funding requests for individual investigations. We can go on further by analyzing more fake news but we won’t do that because it’s pointless.

Instead, we would like to point,

• It was possible for the media to get the story wrong and they do need to publish on anonymous sources but as it became clear that those claims were false and someone deliberately fed the media (considering them innocent) with fake information, the immediate journalistic approach should have been to inform public of the misinformation in equally grand manner and to investigate on what motives the fake leakers had. But that was not done and will not be done because our assumption is wrong that media is innocent; they are part of a grand collusion which we previously said and will say again ‘is nothing short of a coup’. The market is right to fear a coup.