2004 print headline: “The Week That Wasn’t,” published here in October 2004.

The story: It was the year of fake news. No, not 2017, when so-called fake news reigned as a staple of the president’s tweets, Facebook cracked down on false accounts that spewed propaganda, and Collins Dictionary anointed “fake news” its “word of the year.”

Although the term has been co-opted as a cudgel by Trumpites in their battles with some mainstream news organizations, “fake news” — that is, political satire packaged as information — was the province of Jon Stewart-quoting progressives at the peak of the George W. Bush years. To many in 2004, searing dispatches from “The Daily Show” (which billed itself as “the most trusted name in fake news”) and The Onion seemed like the best weapon against Washington spin and obfuscation . (Immediately after Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004, for example, The Onion published an article titled “Nation’s Poor Win Election for Nation’s Rich.”)

A most insincere form of flattery: In 2004, fake news had become the “the comic trope of the moment,” the Times article’s author, Warren St. John, wrote. Much of that could be chalked up to the rising cultural influence of “The Daily Show,” which had become something of a mirror-image Fox News for urban ironists ever since Mr. Stewart took over from Craig Kilborn as the host in 1999. (Stephen Colbert, a star correspondent, would push the envelope even further a year after the article was published, creating a fake news show, “The Colbert Report,” starring a fake newsman alter ego.)

This was also a peak era of influence for The Onion, which by 2004 had become a must-read for the president’s critics as it expanded its print edition to new cities. Other humorists, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Andy Borowitz, were also mining the faux-news format for laughs. Even mainstream organizations were dipping a toe. Episodes of ABC’s “Prime Time Live” closed with a musical rendition of satirical headlines. CNN’s “Larry King Live” hired the comedian Mo Rocca as a wisecracking correspondent at political conventions.