There are, as it happens, at least two kinds of fake news. The one that has become a dirge through the first days of Trump, simple fibs dressed up as facts on Facebook et al – and the more insidious fakery that no one seems to have rumbled yet: mindless news, empty news, news as transient as the latest tweet from the Donald.

British journalists who haven’t been concentrated on Trumpian tactics may, perhaps, be excused last week’s farce. But would any prime minister in her right mind make Nigel Farage – loosest of cannons, most lethal of preening enemies – ambassador to the United States? It’s a joke, a non-starter. So why did a tweet from the president-elect seem to start it?

Because that’s what he does, that’s how he plays the media game: by total distraction. Why talk about serious policies or serious appointments (not to mention serious promises swiftly shredded) when you can whip up a meaningless storm in 140 characters?

Here’s his new White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, sounding off. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f–ing idea what’s going on. If the New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on the New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

So what do you do to bubbles when you win? You burst them. You undermine their confidence. You threaten and bluster. And you make your antipathy to them, and their fear of you, a permanent theme. Remember, according to Gallup, that only 14% of Republicans have a fair amount/great deal of trust in the media, as opposed to 51% of Democrats. It’s important for Trump to keep that distrust and hostility alive.

Important: and pathetically easy, because a warm bath of portentous introversion swills around inside this bubble. Trump’s aim, as Nic Dawes, a brilliant South African editor now head of media at Human Rights Watch in New York, tells fellow journalists in the Columbia Journalism Review, is simple: “To delegitimise accountability journalism by framing it as partisan … Why should anyone care about your investigation of the president’s conflicts of interest, or his tax bills, if they emanate from the political opposition? The scariest thing about ‘fake news’ is that all news becomes fake. Yours too.”

And see how easily the gullibility game works out. Worried about the dodgy details of that $25m Trump University settlement? No sweat. Watch the cast of a Broadway musical slag off your vice-president, then start firing off tweets as usual. Result: no one stops to bother about those university details. The pack has moved on, as you knew they would. “He tweets and they go crazy,” says the mordant commentator Michael Wolff.

So it is, too, with top jobs for rightwing boys such as Bannon, and strategic withdrawals from campaign promises that don’t work any longer, such as locking up Clinton. Who wants to dwell on such things when you call America’s media luminaries in for an off-the-record session with the elected one, then smirk as news of his alleged fury with them leaks all over compliant papers? No problem with how such leaks happened. Need to confect another front in your war against the liberal elite? Mission all too possible.

Look, here’s a tweet calling off a meeting with the New York Times! And here’s another one putting it back on his schedule. Is that a story, or rather two stories? Meeting cancelled; meeting reinstated. Is the Times to be praised for its fortitude in welcoming Trump on the record? Or is that, too, just more space devoted to examination of media navels – an obsession Trump plays on to perfection?

It’s so easy when a tweet or two provokes headlines round the globe. Easy when a single tweet can send Fleet Street and Westminster into a flimsy panic over Farage. Easy when the 24-hour news cycle that Alastair Campbell used to wail about can be spun up and away every time the president-elect logs on to Twitter.

You can present the coming of Trump as a threat to press freedom, the first amendment, and American democracy. Heavy meetings duly summoned. Stiff lips quiver. We’ll see. But, for the moment, it’s more a threat to media sanity as the Donald hooks another open-mouthed big fish, and grins as he winds it in.