No matter what happens in the 2020 election, this chapter of American history could well be called the "fake news age." So I went back to the beginning... to the "fake" origins... cnn.com/2020/10/30/med…
All the anti-media attacks and Covid denialism, all the pro-Trump propaganda and all the assertions that you shouldn't believe your own eyes and ears — I argue that it's all rooted in Trump's insistence that news is "fake." He made the claim for the first time on Jan. 11, 2017...
On that day, @CraigSilverman couldn't believe HIS ears. He had been studying and exposing truly "fake" news, made-up stories, for years. Suddenly Trump has hijacked the term. The two of us took a trip down memory lane for this week's RS podcast cnn.com/audio/podcasts…
He said it's a prime "case study in how our information environment works." Trump exploited the term "fake news;" aspiring autocrats around the world used it as a cudgel; and so "our ability to actually have a focused conversation about, you know, actual fake news" was impaired.
Key insight from @CraigSilverman: Trump "understood very early on that in a crowded field of candidates, and in a crowded and oversaturated information environment, EXTREME wins." The stuff that was supposed to disqualify him, helped him. Will it, again? cnn.com/2020/10/30/med…
The platforms HAVE evolved a lot since 2016. Blatant falsehoods are subject to fact-checks. But hyper-partisan memes and videos and articles are what the platforms "really still don't have any way of dealing with," Silverman said. It's the stuff that fires up "anger and hatred."
Final thought for now: If Joe Biden prevails, it will be — among a hundred other things — a repudiation of the real-is-fake, down-is-up dynamic that has distorted American politics. cnn.com/2020/10/30/med…
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