“Fake news”! The phrase was such a handy hammer for liberals to pound the heads of conservatives—until conservatives grabbed the hammer and started pounding liberals, pointing out some of the fakery that liberals had fallen for. How dare they? So now the liberal mantra is: We must retire that dreadful phrase “fake news.”
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has issued new marching orders to the press: “‘Fake news’ has had its 15 minutes of fame. Let’s put this tainted term out of its misery.”
Remember that the tainted term is strictly of liberal origin. The phrase “fake news” in its current sense only took off in mid-November, when the liberal media scrambled to find some reason why their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, had lost the presidential election besides “She was a lousy candidate who ran a lousy campaign” and “We misread the American electorate.” So was born the notion that Trump voters had mostly been gullible simpletons who believed everything they read on the Internet, including stories with headlines like “Breaking News Surfaces that Obama Was Born in Kenya” and “Pope Francis Forbids Catholics From Voting for Hillary.” (Both these headlines had originated from sites in a village in Macedonia whose clever teenagers had figured how to make sneaker money by generating Facebook clicks that produced ad revenue for them.)
“A big problem here is that the internet has broken down the traditional distinction between professional news-gathering and amateur rumor-mongering,” lamented Vox‘s Timothy B. Lee. One of the aims of the left’s sudden obsession with “fake news” was to persuade Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to “use their power responsibly,” that is, to censor what they considered to be fake news.
Peak fake news phobia on the liberal side can be pinpointed to December 9, when Hillary Clinton, making a post-election appearance on Capitol Hill to honor retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Clinton declared that the spread of fake news, which had “flooded social media over the past year,” could have “real world consequences.” She seemed to be alluding to “Pizzagate,” an Internet rumor that accused the Clinton campaign of running a child sex ring at a pizza shop. The story had inspired a gunman to fire a shot into the pizza parlor in question.
But then, wouldn’t you know, conservatives suddenly started finding “fake news” incidents of their own in which liberals had fallen for rumors unsupported by any direct evidence—such as the story, still widely believed in liberal circles, that the Russians hacked the 2016 election. Even the reliably left-leaning Slate had to admit that
Even worse—for liberals, that is—conservatives started accusing the mainstream media themselves of disseminating fake news for their own political purposes. (We might recall the CNN hosts who raised their hands into the air in a “Hands up, don’t shoot!” pose honoring the supposed words of Ferguson police-shooting victim Michael Brown—even though he in fact said no such thing and was attacking the officer in question when shot.) Predictably, the New York Times recounted with horror:
Well, we can’t have that: unwashed Trump supporters—and the evil Trump himself—accusing our media of spreading fake news. So dear “truth-based community, [that means liberal good guys in the media]” wrote WaPo media columnist Sullivan. “Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.”
Seems that an ox got gored.
