Facts you don't like are not fake news There's confusion about opinion and reporting, but don't let Donald Trump kill off respect for the truth.

Sally Kohn | Opinion contributor

I am not fake news.

I get the accusations all day on Twitter — that when I share a link to reporting in the New York Times or Washington Post, I’m sharing “fake news.” That when I voiced an opinion based on that reporting, it’s “fake news.” That, in fact, I am fake news. “You are unbelievably fake news,” @deplorable777 tweeted at me just a few days ago. “I checked the dictionary for the definition of fake news and your picture was there,” someone else tweeted at me a few days before that. Though, of course, I don’t think she really did check the dictionary. Which raises the question of whether her assertion is real news.

But even before Donald Trump pulled off the lexiconic jujutsu of disguising his own lies by re-branding the truth as fake, I was often criticized on Twitter for not strictly reporting fact but expressing my opinions. This is because, as a columnist and a political commentator on CNN, that is literally my job. I am paid for my opinions. Yet this seems to confuse some people.

Once upon a time, there were only reporters and “straight news men” on television — literally and figuratively. They reported the “straight news,” delivering just the facts and not their opinion on the facts. And also the people doing this happened mostly to be straight men. Historically in our racially biased and discriminatory society, we associate whiteness and maleness with authority and truth — as though straight white men aren’t in fact inherently biased toward other straight white men and thus responsible for the perpetuation of the status quo from which they uniquely benefited, but somehow uniquely benefit from some decontextualized true north. We know better now, or we like to think we do. One study found that people on Craigslist trust white sellers more than black sellers. And white men still disproportionately dominate television news anchor seats and reporting slots. We all have our biases. They impact every part of our lives.

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At any rate, what has changed more dramatically than the makeup of who covers the news is the nature of the coverage. Once upon a time, opinions about news events were relegated to the editorials and op-ed pages of newspapers, and the rest of the news media was supposed to try its best to leave its biases at the door — and report “just the facts.” But early innovators like PBS’s McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire introduced opinion where news reporting once dominated, starting to blur the line. The punditocracy became a fixture of cable news, and the distinction between reporting and opinion got even blurrier. The explosion of blogs made matters truly muddled.

I remember asking my mom once what her favorite “news” site was, and she told me it was the Daily Kos — which is a great resource indeed, but I had to explain to my well-educated and informed mom that it’s not a news site, it’s an opinion site. And there’s an important difference. Yet while opinion in media has rapidly grown, our media literacy hasn’t kept up. When I appear on CNN, where I’m a paid commentator, there’s no sign that flashes above my head informing viewers that I’m offering opinions — and that there’s an important difference between me and the conservative commentators I’m on arguing with compared to the CNN reporters who come before or after us on a show and describe the facts of the news as it’s unfolding. This difference may seem obvious to some people. It’s not obvious to everyone. And that’s a problem.

Every single time I go on television, I get a tweet or an email calling me “the most biased reporter on CNN” or something to that effect. In fact, I get a lot of these comments. Often. Which suggests that we’ve done a bad job of explaining to the public that there is a difference between news and opinion and who on their screen is there for which purpose. When I get these confused criticisms, I try to always write back explaining that it is my job to be biased. I’m a commentator. I am literally paid to express my point of view. Bias is basically the job description.

“Fake news” as its used today has become a cheap term, but calling opinion journalists “fake news” somehow manages to cheapen the term even further — like instead of a valid label against stories manufactured by 400-pound Macedonian hackers masquerading as real news on Facebook, the term just becomes a catchall for anything you don’t like. I’m fake news, and so are Chuck Schumer and Shakira. More worrisome, throwing around “fake news” to describe opinion exacerbates the existing confusion in the face of the information we all consume — making our fellow human beings less able to tell the difference between news and everything else.

You are completely free to disagree with my opinion. This is America. Dissent and disagreement is an essential ingredient of our politics and culture. But what we cannot and must not do is conflate opinions and facts and suggest that facts, too, are subject to opinion and disagreement. An informed democracy can’t survive if people think their opinions are facts and the facts they don’t like are just opinions. And an informed citizenry needs to know the difference.

Sally Kohn is a writer and CNN political commentator. You can find her online at sallykohn.com.

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