Their move was efficacious, as the term has already possessed an inherent connotation that signifies falsity unwarrantedly, which could mislead the public and defend suspicious governmental activities.
President Donald Trump is undoubtedly the leading figure in the deterioration of the term. He has successfully deflected the mediated public debate by arbitrarily deriding much of news stories as “fake news.”
The Mueller report controversy, which confirms that much so-called fake news about Russian interference and obstruction of justice are real stories, is one of the epitomai of the inclination.
Moreover, the “fake news” debate also made United States to miss the prime chance to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
As early as January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued an alert for “a reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology (PUE)…in China.”
At that point, while officials and institutions have worked diligently to prevent the domestic spread of the virus, Trump undermined his administration’s effort to tackle the outbreak—resisting planning for worst scenarios, overturning public health plan request by political allies and releasing outright lies and misstatements.
Facing the overwhelming criticism for his hesitance on taking decisive measures, President Trump spun the disparagement to fake news again, tweeting that “low ratings fake news…are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible.”
Even today, due to the dereliction of the White House and some other parts of the government, the U.S. has not yet seen a positive turn on the spread of the coronavirus.
For example, California has seen total cases rose more than 90 percent by the end of June, and the death toll of the state has passed 6, 500. As such, Gov. Newsom even warned the second stay-home order if the situation keeps getting worse.
By the end of June, as the virus spiked across the Sun Belt and California because of the accelerated reopening, president Trump, again, diverted the conflict by blaming “Far Left Fake News Media” COVID-shaming the administration while generalizing all BLM protestors as rioters and looters. Yet, there has been substantial evidence supporting that the BLM movement isn’t spreading the virus substantially.
Moreover, the recent Russian bounty scandal has also evinced the danger of abusing the “fake news” label.
Although numerous reports detailed that Trump administration was aware as early as 2019 that Russian had been offering bounties to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers, there is no indication that the president has done anything to take retaliatory actions to Putin.
Instead, like what he always does, President Trump trotted a mix of untenable excuses—including arguing that he was never briefed about the matter—and blasted all the castigation as “made up Fake News Media Hoax.”
Conclusively, aforementioned examples suggest that the weaponization of the “fake news” label has seriously deceived the public and obliquely murdered countless Americans from COVID-19 and Taliban soldiers. Therefore, we should do our best to curb the abuse of the label and support professional journalism that endeavors to reveal the truth to the public.
*Attached below is my PSA video about the topic
Xiangyuan Chi 