The constant cries of “fake news” are especially insidious because not only is it an attempt to discredit the free press, but it shifts the focus from the original problem.
Never forget, “fake news” didn’t start because the president didn’t like what the media was saying about him. Fake news started as pseudo-journalists making up false stories intentionally and being paid by the click and by the share from nefarious sources. There have even been reports of rooms full of Russian journalists doing nothing but publishing fabricated stories throughout the campaign.
Now all the focus is on who is really lying, who is “fake news”, is it the media or the White House? People dedicated to truth are finding themselves constantly defending the media. We are being conditioned to accept stories from outside the White House as factual. But the more we focus on that, the less prepared we will be for the next onslaught of actual fake news.
The SDMB stands as an example of how “fake news” derails the discussion. I don’t think we can count the threads that quickly devolved from being about *something *to being about the discussion of that something. **SA **has it exactly right: the Bannon White House is simply going to use the adjective “dishonest” in every sentence about the media, and cry “Fake news!” at every uncomplimentary report until it’s taken for granted by Joe Public, who will get lost in the argument about whether news is “fake” or “honest” or not and fail to see the real topics.
Bannon knows this weak spot in the US psyche well, and he’s kicking the shit out of it. He isn’t even trying to be subtle about it. There are sixth-grade bullies with more concealed motives and actions.
It won’t work. The news is part of Big Media, and they have a hell of a lot more bandwidth than the whiner-in-chief. They haven’t yet brought out their big guns, but if they feel threatened, the White House will be flattened.
Nixon thought he could blame the press, and the press took great joy in destroying him.
(Meanwhile, of course, the other side has had Fox News for years and years. Obama had enough sanity not to obsess over them.)
Even if the media wins the battle of who is more truthful, the goalposts have been moved. By he next election, it will be forgotten that fake news was not about the mainstream media, it was about fraudulent, fabricated stories.
The public is being conditioned to consider “fake news” accusations as nothing more than whining, so when actual fake news is created in the future to the WH’s benefit, they can scoff at the fake news accusers just as we are scoffing at them now. They are devaluing the difference between truth and lies.
Of course, arguments and complaints about one thing tend to distract attention from others. So every time there’s an accusation of fake news about something relatively ephemeral, look for something else with potential long-term consequences that’s happening quietly in the background.
Pretty much this. To the extent that anyone leaves the echo chamber of their social media cocoon, they’re going to be subjected to the recurring message that the accusations of ‘fake news’ coming from Trump and his surrogates is nothing more than another attempted deception in a continuous stream of attempted deceptions just like everything from the size of the crowd at Donald’s inauguration to the Bowling Green Massacre and now to whatever allegedly happened in Sweden. The only antidote for Trump supporters will be to completely withdraw into their echo chambers, which many have no doubt already done, or attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by obviously conflicting messages.