The Real-World Consequences of Trump's 'Fake News' Catchphrase - The Atlantic - 0 views
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When Donald Trump’s press secretary was recently asked to comment on a rogues’ gallery of foreign leaders embracing her boss’s catchphrase of “fake news,” she essentially made the Las Vegas argument: What happens in the United States stays in the United States. “I’m not going to speak to specifics of another country when I don’t know the details,” said Sarah Sanders. “The White House is concerned about false and inaccurate information being pushed out ... to mislead the American people.”
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Like many successful branding campaigns, Trump’s is grounded in some truth: The term “fake news” emerged, in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as a reference to the deliberately false stories that Russian government propagandists and assorted troublemakers around the world were spreading on Facebook and other social-media platforms to help or harm a particular candidate, sow chaos, or simply make a quick buck. The weaponization of information and large-scale manufacture of disinformation have become fixtures of contemporary politics.
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But in specifically repurposing the term “fake news,” and conflating unfavorable journalism with disinformation, Trump is arguing that journalists maliciously fabricate the sources and substance of their reporting—at least when what they report doesn’t reflect well on him.
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