CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: The Left is Trying to Eliminate the Phrase ‘Fake News’ Sun Feb 10, 2019 6:25 pm | |
| President Trump likes to use the phrase “fake news” to label biased news stories by the left-leaning media. That’s changing how the public views the media. The negative association has resulted in an increase in distrust of the media.
Nearly all Republicans (92 percent) now believe the media publishes fake news, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. More than half of Democrats (53 percent) believe so. The phrase has hurt the credibility of esteemed publications like The New York Times. The term first described stories internet trolls made up to sound real. When it first became popular in the fall of 2016, it mainly referred to false stories put out by Russians and others trying to interfere with U.S. elections. The left used it to describe right-leaning news sources like Breitbart and RedState. Trump adopted the term to describe left-leaning news sites. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor at Merrimaack College in Massachusetts, compiled a list that contains some leading right-leaning sites. Breitbart it describes as “political” and “unreliable.” It describes Redstate as “political” and “clickbait.” The list also includes the leftwing Daily Beast, though it describes it only as “political.”
It’s an Effective PhraseTrump started using the phrase in 2016. He used it a couple of times a week, often in tweets. The media had to report on it, increasing its use. Collins Dictionary found last fall that the use of the phrase had risen 365 percent since 2016. And it’s become almost entirely a term applied to the left-leaning media. “Trump supporters, and eventually Trump himself, coopted it as a derogatory epithet for mainstream news sites whose political coverage they found to be flawed or biased,” complains Slate magazine. It is now “a handy cudgel for people who want to criticize the media for a wide range of failings.”
https://stream.org/the-left-is-trying-to-eliminate-the-phrase-fake-news/
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