,
7 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
Inspired by the great @JaneMayerNYer piece I went looking for a thread I'd done on Hannity and noticed something weird. Back in July I'd noted how Hannity started tweeting about "fake news" right when the Russia stuff was about to break. Those tweets are now gone.
@JaneMayerNYer This January I did another Twitter search to see when the phrase "fake news" came into the GOP lexicon. By that point, all of Hannity's "fake news" tweets were gone.
@JaneMayerNYer It appears that Hannity has deleted ALL of his tweets from 2016, so this was not a selective deletion. I don't follow him that closely, so perhaps there was a reason given for why this important media figure erased his Twitter tracks?
@JaneMayerNYer But I do want to come back to one thing I discovered from my "fake news" research. December 7-9, 2016 is the take off moment for that phrase. The time when it entered our national discourse in its current form.
@JaneMayerNYer Hannity's (now deleted) timeline from December 2016 perfectly captures the switch. December 6 he uses "fake news" in the old way. December 8 he uses it in the way in which it is now familiar to us. 
@JaneMayerNYer I'm not suggesting there's some sort of conspiracy afoot. I'm just wondering, if we could listen in to the conversations between Trump's people and the folks at Fox News from December 2016, if we'd hear them coordinating their "fake news" messaging around "the Russia stuff."
@JaneMayerNYer In sum, my gut tells me there's "a story" here about the history of the term "fake news" in our national discourse that, as far as I know, remains untold. Would love to see a journalist dig more deeply into this.
