December 27, 2018 Jack Kerwick
Though many people, particularly the opponents of Donald Trump, would prefer not to remember this, the truth is that it is they, the President’s enemies, who first coined the term, “Fake News.” And they used it to refer to pro-Trump social media coverage.
To repeat, it is not Trump or any of his supporters who manufactured this nomenclature.
Brilliantly, the President commandeered the label and slapped it on the left-leaning press, forever ensconcing within the popular imagination the identification of Fake News with what conservatives formerly called “the liberal media.”
But “Fake News” isn’t merely an effective piece of rhetoric. It’s also an accurate assignation for an endemic phenomenon. Fake News is real—and it long predates the political rise of Donald Trump.
To be sure, to say of a news item that it is fake news is not, necessarily, to say that it is a blatant lie. In fact, Fake News is powerful precisely because it normally does contain some truth. About a century ago, G.K. Chesterton, an English academic and essayist who converted to Roman Catholicism, wrote that what made the “journalism” of his day especially dangerous is not that it consisted of flagrant untruths; rather, its danger stemmed from the fact that it was a pack of “half-truths.” Things haven’t changed. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of race.............These black children who tormented another black child for being friends with a white child were doing nothing more or less than what black teens and adults have been doing to other blacks who they convict of lacking racial authenticity: to summarize, McKenzie Nichole Adams was hounded to her death by peers who tormented her for “acting white.”............To Read More.....
Though many people, particularly the opponents of Donald Trump, would prefer not to remember this, the truth is that it is they, the President’s enemies, who first coined the term, “Fake News.” And they used it to refer to pro-Trump social media coverage.
To repeat, it is not Trump or any of his supporters who manufactured this nomenclature.
Brilliantly, the President commandeered the label and slapped it on the left-leaning press, forever ensconcing within the popular imagination the identification of Fake News with what conservatives formerly called “the liberal media.”
But “Fake News” isn’t merely an effective piece of rhetoric. It’s also an accurate assignation for an endemic phenomenon. Fake News is real—and it long predates the political rise of Donald Trump.
To be sure, to say of a news item that it is fake news is not, necessarily, to say that it is a blatant lie. In fact, Fake News is powerful precisely because it normally does contain some truth. About a century ago, G.K. Chesterton, an English academic and essayist who converted to Roman Catholicism, wrote that what made the “journalism” of his day especially dangerous is not that it consisted of flagrant untruths; rather, its danger stemmed from the fact that it was a pack of “half-truths.” Things haven’t changed. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of race.............These black children who tormented another black child for being friends with a white child were doing nothing more or less than what black teens and adults have been doing to other blacks who they convict of lacking racial authenticity: to summarize, McKenzie Nichole Adams was hounded to her death by peers who tormented her for “acting white.”............To Read More.....
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