‘Fake news’ has now lost all meaning

Once upon a time (like, three months ago), “fake news” had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election. Since then, conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don't like.

At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted that “any negative polls are fake news.” All but Trump's most lemming-like followers will recognize the logical fallacy of such a statement. The risk that voters, on the whole, will accept the idea that “negative equals fake” is probably very low. More insidious is the notion that a report qualifies as fake news if it requires a correction. Such an overly broad definition unfairly attaches malicious intent to the kinds of mistakes that inevitably appear in good-faith journalism.