By Megan Murphy
Editor-in-Chief
Since President Trump coined the phrase “fake news” during the 2016 election, it has skyrocketed in popularity.
According to Politifact, the phrase was used by officials in Myanmar to deny the ethnic cleansing (and existence) of Rohingya Muslims in the country.
“There is no such thing as Rohingya,” an official said, according to Politifact. “It is fake news.” In Syria, Venezuela, and China, the term was also used by the government to deny and blame the media for making up these claims.
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, who’s administration’s tacit support for the extrajudicial killing of drug users has been denounced worldwide, called journalists “spies” even as he claimed the murders were “fake news”.
From this country’s foundation, a free press has been one of the cornerstones of American democracy. So, people should be more concerned when the president of the United States called major media outlets “the enemy of the American people” and held his own “fake news awards”.
There should have been outrage when members of the press were harassed and threatened at his campaign rallies, where proud American citizens shouted “Lügenpresse”, or “lying press”, at journalists, a term used in Nazi Germany to discredit the press while the government endorsed and carried out the slaughter of millions of Jewish people. Today, many conspiracy theorists deny even that atrocity, calling the Holocaust itself “fake news”.
Facts seem to matter less and less in today’s world, and so it is no wonder that 41% of Americans cannot recall what “Auschwitz” was, according to a study by Claims Conference released on April 12. Instead, people get their news from their Facebook feeds, and if a news story happens to hold their political faction accountable for something, well, then that’s just more fake news.
Never mind that real “fake news” is an actual problem, that a man walked into a pizza joint in December 2016 and fired a gun based on an insane conspiracy theory that claimed Hillary Clinton and her cohorts were running a sex trafficking ring through the restaurant.
If I sound a little frustrated, it’s because I am. Like most journalists, I care about the truth, regardless of political party or personal bias. I care about holding people accountable for their actions and keeping the public informed.
Journalists are not the “enemy of the American people”, and treating them as such could potentially lead towards the end of American democracy as we know it.
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