Washington Post Cries Uncle: Stop Using ‘Tainted’ Term ‘Fake News’

Writing at the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan bemoans the fact that conservatives have flipped the meaning of “fake news” from a term used by the mainstream media to attack stories that are troublesome for progressives to a label to call out the media’s false narratives:

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.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

Read the rest of the story at the Washington Post.