Fake News Mistake
By JACK SHAFER January 18, 2018
... If the Fake News Awards were a meal, they would be a maggoty helping of twice-fried ground corn cob.
The Trump awards come as a letdown because he's been tub-thumping about fake news incessantly since December 2016. According to Factbase, which collects his spoken and written statements in searchable form, he has called some press organization or reporter "fake news" at nearly 300 times. Given his strong views on the topic, you’d expect some stinging specificity to his criticism. But most of the time he uses a crop duster to paint the entire press corps with his gripe and to disparage stories that don’t flatter him. The Washington Post is fake news, he has said in blanket censure. He expresses the same about CNN, NBC, the New York Times and ABC and CBS, often without bothering to stipulate what, exactly, is fake.
Trump lives to make the generalized complaints about the press, such as this gem from February 2017, "Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election." (The national polls, it turns out, correctly predicted Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote victory; it was the state polls that were off base.)
He also likes to pounce on news stories that later turn out to be true. Remember last March when he claimed those reports of "big infighting in the Trump" administration were more fake news? Guess which administration now holds the record for first-year staff departures? ...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/18/donald-trumps-fake-news-mistake-216480
