Politifact, a partisan leftist site that is a crucial part of the media's effort to use a "fake news" crisis to censor conservative sites on social media, is very unhappy about President Trump's"fake news" accusations.
PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holanwrote an editorial on Wednesday taking issue with President Trump’s declarations of “fake news.”
The editorial is titled, "The media's definition of fake news vs. Donald Trump's".
When PolitiFact fact-checks fake news, we are calling out fabricated content that intentionally masquerades as news coverage of actual events.
When President Donald Trump talks about fake news, he means something else entirely.
Actually no. The media left uses it to mean virtually any news story by the political opposition that it chooses to challenge.
So the media and Trump largely use "fake news" to mean the same thing. The actual fake news sites are mostly a non-issue except that the left deliberately conflates them with conservative sites.
Trump is particularly quick to label coverage "fake news" when the reports have unnamed sources, and unnamed sources seem to make Trump the most irate.
Anonymous sources don't have much credibility for obvious reasons.
Other First Amendment advocates described Trump’s use of the term "fake news" as Orwellian, because it uses words to mean the opposite of their literal definition, as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
"It is a characteristic of authoritarian leaders, whether Communist or Nazi, to appropriate ordinary words and declare them to mean the opposite," said Bruce Johnson, a Seattle-based media lawyer.
Insisting that you get to control the words other people use is actually Orwellian.
There's no literal definition of fake news. Declaring that there is one and that anyone who doesn't use it is a Communist or Nazi is... you guessed it. Typical of totalitarian ideologies.