After this was debunked on Monday, Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy repeated the lie on Wednesday on Fox News.
Of course he did. The right doesn’t give a shit about actual fake news. To them, fake news is something they don’t agree with.
I know using -gate at the end of a scandal is trite and cliche by now, but can we please refer to the Matt Gaetz situation as either “Tailgate” or “TailGaetz?”
“Oppression” is blacks being pulled over because they drive too nice a car or are in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood. “Oppression” is blacks being sentenced too stiffer penalties than whites. “Oppression” is the Law assuming blacks are going to be violent before they even get of their fucking cars. “Oppression” is blacks being very over-represented in prisons.
Fuck this lying asshole.
I would refine this a bit:
True news is that which is helpful for advancing their agenda. Fake news is that which undercuts or obstructs their agenda.
It’s not like or dislike. it’s utility.
Agree with Fiveyearlurker. This is an incredibly bad graphic that conflates having a partisan lean with being unreliable.
- Vox: Investing more money into the IRS would help catch tax cheats and pay for itself 5 times over.
- OAN: The Demoncrat party is a satanic pedophile ring!
Allsides: those two things are mirror images of each other. Nearly all the outlets on the far left on that graphic are legitimate news sources while every single one on the right are raving lunatic conspiracy theorists.
I think Trump himself popularized the term originally, and his rubric seems to have been “real news tells me I’m winning, fake news tells me my rivals are winning.”
I don’t think Fox has tinkered with that formula very much. Though it’s correct that their version of truth is agenda-driven, that agenda is overwhelmingly dominated by conservatives needing to think that things ought to go our way, and will certainly go our way, and if not, then rules were broken by liberals, foreigners, and brown people, and we’ll certainly get due payback (and then some).
“Fake news” was bouncing around the general lexicon before Trump. It meant news that was unverified, unlikely, or even contradicted by the facts.
Trump used it to infer the same meaning, but applied it to anything that he simply disagreed with.
I’m aware the term fake news predated Trump (as I think most people know). It was originally a complaint from the left about (verified) disinfo factories in the Eastern Bloc fabricating news stories to be distributed on social media.
As tends to happen, Trump appropriated it, rebranded it as “anything that makes me feel like I’m not winning”, and weaponized it against the people who originated it. Fox and his other supporters took it as absolute license to lie even more flagrantly, since “the other side is doing it.”
I was referring to ‘the Faux News Network’ back in the 90s, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It wasn’t nonexistent, but it wasn’t exactly in the vernacular before he started using it.
“Fake news” is a very Trumpy thing to say - I think we’re just looking at parallel evolution more than appropriation.
I think it’s interesting that searches for the term peaked so early - was that the scuffle about his inauguration attendance numbers or am I forgetting something else?
That one definitely has a longer history. The consistent peaks and valleys are really interesting - I do wonder what that’s about.
It really depend on how you define ‘vernacular’. But my recollection, which seems to correlate to your chart, is that “fake news” emerged right around the 2016 election and emerged as part of the liberal postmortem as to why Trump won.
Up to the inauguration, mainly liberals like myself were talking about fake news as the real and verified problem that it was. Then right around the inauguration Trump suddenly repurposed it to mean “stuff that makes me feel not winning.” His supporters were hungry for a term like that. He has a larger platform than you & I do, so his definition won. After that, nobody much talked about the actual fake news, the GRU troll farms in Russia and Macedonia, until they showed up in the Mueller report, and people yawned and continued to ignore it.
That’s how I recollect it, anyhow.
It sounds about right. The only thing that I would add is that Trump then claimed to have coined the phrase.
Well of course he did. That’s what makes the whole story so awfully perfect and on-brand.
A quote from Trump in that article:
“I guess other people have used it, perhaps, over the years but I’ve never noticed it.”
I believe him 100%, in the sense that I believe he notices almost nothing that doesn’t have to do with him directly.
Having said that, I’ll drop the pedantry because defending the man in any context whatsoever leaves me nauseous.
Yeah, I am not longer using that site, and now just use my bookmarked NPR, AP, BBC, Reuters links for my news sources. There is no news aggregator that can top one’s personal search for truth and facts.
Fox and the right wing media certainly seem to be a big part of the answer to the question of why Trump supporters were so confident of victory in the runup to the last election. Manipulating polls to get the answers their viewers wanted, focusing on the enthusiasm at the rallies, continually pointing out that Trumpy had shit all over the prognosticators four years before, those all had the people who absorb that information having no doubt that their boyo would do it again.
Of course, I may have been the only one here who was mystified at the time. I’m a little bit of a slow learner.
And even after.
I remember Snopes labeling things as “fake news” long before Trump made it his mantra for anything he disliked. I remember being irritated at his usage of it the first time I heard it, since the term was already in use and referred to something very different than what he coopted it for. It meant a completely falsified news story, often a hoax or poorly-labeled satire on a web site that masqueraded as a local news channel.
Ah… They even have an article about it.
So they started using the term around 2013-2014, which seems about right in my recollection, but they dropped it once it no longer held any real meaning in the public eye thanks to Trump strangling it with his tiny, greasy orange fingers.
That matches my recollection as well. When I first started hearing Trump use “Fake news”, it was more along the lines of “No puppet, no puppet, You’re the puppet! the Russians aren’t spreading fake news, you are”. Then this resonated with his base so well that he just kept doing it.
I think he remembers it but is just lying to provide a little cover when it is clearly demonstrated that the phrase predates his use. He made a similar caveat when he claimed to have invented the phrase “prime the pump”. If he honestly didn’t remember it he wouldn’t have even suggested the possibility that someone might have said it before.