Please, Just Shut Up About Fake News

After Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss, Democrats scrambled for a way to rationalize the defeat. They blamed the FBI, and James Comey’s decision to briefly reopen the email investigation (unlikely, but plausible). They blamed Wikileaks (also unlikely but plausible). Then they blamed Russians hacking the election results (kind of conspiracy theorist-y, but still stemming from real events, the DNC hacks and Trump’s disturbingly close ties with Russia and bromance with Vladimir Putin.

And then out came the argument that it was “fake news” that deprived Clinton of the presidency. As if stories about her secretly being a sex-crazed child molester somehow swung the votes of hundreds of thousands of people across the Midwest, who had voted reliably Democratic for decades. (Side note: Ew. That’s obviously her husband, who many of those same voters apparently had no trouble supporting back in the day.)

This overuse of the phrase is rapidly making it one of those choice collection of syllables that make me cringe at their very sound, like the way some people feel about "moist". Or, for me, "pundit". For whatever reason, I despise that word and will do everything in my power to make sure I never use it again on this site.

Democrats are acting like fake news is some sudden phenomenon, springing from the ground of a world fertilized by Donald Trump tweets, and that it is being used single-handedly against liberals. Two points on that: first, fake news has been a thing for almost as long as real news. I’m sure the ancient Greeks were beset by stories about Pericles having affairs with goats and secretly running a brothel out of his basement. The Onion has been publishing since the 1980’s, and had an online presence since 1996. Social media has been in existence in one form or another for over a decade. And no one got the idea of sharing stories about “Hillary Clinton Spins a Cocoon” or “This Bird Has Been Stalking Obama for Years” until 2016?

And second, the idea that fake news can only harm liberals is ridiculous on its face. Dan Rather, anyone? The Duke lacrosse players? The saga of Rolling Stone and “A Rape On Campus”, and the emerging journalistic standard of “false but accurate”? I don’t recall any deep media reflection on fake news then.

Basically, the whole idea that fake news influenced the election in any meaningful way is ridiculous on its face. Just how gullible and stupid do liberals think we are?

Oh. Never mind.