“Fake news” is a fake term; let’s find more accurate language

“Fake news” made news last week when Lake Superior State University released its 43rd annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. The term was the top votegetter among the 14 worthless words and phrases on the list.

“Fake news” no longer means a discredited rumor or an exposed lie. “Now ‘fake news’ is any story you disagree with,” notes the list’s authors.

“Meaningless words,” observed George Orwell, “are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

Since “fake news” no longer represents anything meaningful, let’s banish the term from public discourse and replace it with something more accurate.

For journalist mistakes, “oops news” would be a more accurate (if less chic) term. Reporters err like the rest of us. Can political bias contribute to sloppy reporting? Yes. Do reporters get up each morning hoping to make a career-ending mistake? No. Oops news cost Brian Ross a month’s suspension without pay, three CNN journalists their jobs, and Fox News a lawsuit last year. Safe to say they weren’t trying to get it wrong.

Then there’s “spoof news.” The Babylon Bee headline “New York Times Reports 18 Billion People Will Die From Republican Tax Plan” provoked a Facebook friend’s frantic retort: “That’s fake news!” No, it’s satire. Satire is an artful counterfeit designed to reveal a deeper truth — in this case, New York Times reporters’ need for Xanax when reporting about Republican legislation.

For a year now, CNN has been churning out “unnerved news” with zeal. A recent headline declared the “End of the Internet as we know it” after the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules. CNN should start posting headlines in ALL CAPS with a Vladimir Putin face emoji for maximum clickbait. Meanwhile, Fox News has become the “nothing-to-seehere news” network in service to the Trump administration.

“Non-news” best describes the pulp that fills space in the 24hour news cycle. The Aspen Times, for example, recently reported that someone had hung a rainbow banner declaring “Make America Gay Again” near the residence where Vice President Mike Pence and his wife were staying. Exactly how is that news? Perhaps the best example of front-page, above-the-fold non-news coverage was of the knitting of pussyhats this time last year. Coverage could only have been more ridiculous if articles had led with a pattern.

During the Obama administration, the media did a better job not reporting political theater and pseudo-events as though they were news. Now we’re treating inane tweets from the Oval Office as news even though they are non-news. Sadly, the daily coverage seems to be encouraging the covfefe.

In the “fib news” category are deliberately false and misleading news reports. Media deception can be obvious — lying about being under fire while reporting in Iraq, for example — or subtle, like interviewing the most ignorant person at an event to imply he represents the whole. Deceit can also be achieved through omission. The Hill’s misleading headline “DeVos uses private jet for work-related travel” left out that she uses her own jet and pays for the fuel, points missed if one just read the headline, as many outraged Twitter users evidently did.

Speaking of falsehoods, President Donald Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims since taking office, according to The Washington Post. He’s finally set a big-league record, bigly. On Tuesday, President Trump announced he will be giving “awards” next week for “Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media.”

Non-news? If only. The word for this is demagoguery, rhetoric that inflames the populace against a less than popular minority. In this case, the people he’s attempting to marginalize with allegations of “fake news” are the ones trying to hold him accountable, however imperfectly. That can’t be good for democracy.

It’s time to retire the term “fake news” and call things what they really are.