It's Exhausting Keeping Up With Fake News

It has been exhausting keeping up with all the lies, half-truths and distortions that emanate from Trump and his minions. What is truly frightening his his apparent reliance on fake news stories and his tendency to tweet ill-considered opinions about the last thing that he heard about.

The term fake news and fake news sites has gained prominence in this election, mainly due to how often people formed their opinions based on these sites. A current example is the gunman who fired his weapon in a pizza place in D.C. because he has read in a fake news site about a Clinton-run ring of pedophiles operating from there. Donald Trump has been complicit in the legitimizing of fake news; he made a distrust of the mainstream media a major point in his campaigns. He kept the press sequestered in "pens" during his campaign rallies and accused them of colluding with Clinton to rig the election in her favor.

The mainstream press is not always right. Sometimes they get a story wrong. Sometimes individual reporters make things up. Sometimes their implicit bias influences a story. Other times a lack of resources will determine what gets covered and what doesn't. But the press in general wants their stories to be accurate. They research, they interview, they fact-check. Sources are vetted. Impartiality is the goal. It not just, as Donald Trump speculated, some guy in his parents' basement. It's a business that has staked its reputation on accuracy.

Fake news is none of those things. Often it's just one or two people writing blogs. Or it's an organization with an axe to grind or a specific point of view. They traffic in wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Facts are unimportant if they get in the way of the narrative. Fake news is not a mainstream news outlet making a mistake, it's not a reporter embellishing his exploits, it's not even perceived bias; fake news is misinformation, it's propaganda, it's a point of view where facts are irrelevant. And now our President-Elect, in addition to relying on fake news to inform his policies, has been tarring real news sources as fake news when they disagree with him, or say negative things about him.

Early in the campaign I'd read a Trump tweet, or hear something he said, think it sounded off, and then do some research. More often than not I'd discover fairly quickly that he was wrong. Now I just assume that what he says and tweets is bullshit. The odds are in my favor that way.