The National Laughingstock's Margaret Sullivan: Now That Our Enemy the Right Is Using the Term "Fake News," It's Time to Retire It

Margaret Sullivan seems to be saying that Fake News From Approved Sources Can't Be Fake News.

If you'd prefer not to click on the National Laughinstock, Michael Walsh quotes the best bits at PJ Media.

When Jim DeMint wanted to dis a TV interviewer’s suggestion that Obamacare has merits as well as flaws, the former senator and tea partyer used a handy putdown: "You can put all that under the category of fake news."

When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wanted to deny a CNN report that Ivanka Trump would take over the East Wing offices traditionally occupied by the first lady, he used the same label.

And when a writer for an arch-conservative website needed a putdown for ABC's chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, he reached for the obvious: "fake-news propagandist."

Fake news has a real meaning -- deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn't been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say "Pizzagate," the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

No, when I say "fake news" I also mean deceptive news articles intended to mislead the public. Like, for example, the Fake News Media always calling the DNC/Podesta emails hack "election hacking," which is responsible for 52% of all Democrats believing actual election vote tallies were hacked and altered, or CBS radio news deliberately implying that a racist attack of four blacks cutting on a disabled white man was actually a case of whites wolfpacking a black victim.

How is that not fake news according to the definition Sullivan offers?

"Macedonian teenagers" are not the only people who write deliberately-false stories in efforts to get clicks and shape US politics. The art of fake news has been developed and weaponized by (somewhat) well-paid liberals sitting in cozy offices in our "professional" newsrooms for 40 years.

posted by Ace at 02:39 PM

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