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They couldn’t just step out honestly and say: “Hey, we despised this guy so much that it really warped our thinking and twisted our coverage, blocked out what we didn’t want to see. We were so mad at him we could not see.” That would have been the truthful and honourable thing to do. So, obviously, it was not adopted. Instead, the answer they did come up with, quickly and conveniently enough, was Fake News.

Now there has always been fake news

Now there has always been fake news. Newspaper, TV, magazines have always, to some degree, had a slant, an overall editorial direction. But the Fake News that we heard about for most of 2017, and were warned against by journalism’s elders, and was so deplored by the monks of NPR and PBS, was something new and altogether more sinister. This Fake News was a project in itself, something crafted specifically and particularly, and deployed maliciously, by the fiends of the Trump campaign.

The way the term Fake News was invoked by newscasters, panels, and journalism profs was actually kind of scary. Fake News was a threat to the republic; it enjoyed a corrupting power that effortlessly ousted the voices of the real media, and blunted the rational minds of the electorate. That Fake News was powerful stuff.

Actually, it was just a lot of silly rationalization for poor coverage, an excuse for incompetence on the part of much of the professional press. Fake News, no surprise, is itself fake news. That’s the primary thing to know about it. It is a product of the eagerly conspiratorial minds of the anti-Trumpers and Never Trumpers. It is quite interesting to note how the rational liberal observers of 2017 are so invested in conspiracies. They think the idiot Trump—for that is how they see him—set in motion complicated collusions with Putin and the Russians, and simultaneously undermined the national media with Fake News, and lulled an entire nation into the belief that he could not be elected.

Not bad for a 69 year old loon and lout.

Such has been the substance of the coverage of the Trump presidency since the day he took office. There’s the—forgive the expression—real fake news.