Trump’s opponents seem to have coined the term “fake news” to describe hearsay and rumors that circulated on the internet in support of his campaign.
But now the anti-Trump hysteria has reached such a fever pitch that the mainstream media is churning out fake news about the president and his administration. Never mind professional standards of objectivity and fact-checking. Journalists are publishing and broadcasting stories apparently devised solely to fire up “the resistance.”
Daniel Payne at The Federalist has compiled a list of 16 fake news stories about our new president. As he shows in his discussion, these are not stories whose facts are in dispute. Each of these has been found false by the newspapers or broadcasters that published them. They put up corrections, which, of course, receive little attention as the false reports continue to spread on Twitter and FaceBook.
This is not a comprehensive list. What other fake news stories are not included here?
By Daniel Payne, 16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won, The Federalist:
Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”
The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.
It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.
Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.
[Keep reading. . . .The story goes on to discuss 16 fake news stories about President Trump and his administration.]
Illustration by Lisa Padilla, Creative Commons License
Trump’s opponents seem to have coined the term “fake news” to describe hearsay and rumors that circulated on the internet in support of his campaign.
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