ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Fake news.” Funny, isn’t it: After all these years and only after Hillary Clinton loses the presidential election to Donald Trump do we hear about the ominous scourge of the newly dubbed “fake news.”

Yet, those complaining are the people who created and propagated the concept itself. From Walter Cronkite, who bemoaned not being able to “shape the news” later in life, to President Obama’s lackey Ben Rhodes. An aspiring novelist before being tapped to assist the president, Mr. Rhodes bragged to The New York Times the Obama White House is essentially Edgar Bergen to the media’s Charlie McCarthy.

The establishment is the creator and purveyor of fake news, and now after WikiLeaks exposed in living color the collusion between the press and their political favorites, they have an urgent need to distract and accuse.

After stumbling head-first into her second-place finish (losing any hope for Miss Congeniality along the way), Mrs. Clinton and her lackeys likely realized they don’t have control over all the media any longer. It is so much easier, after all, to perpetuate a fraud upon the American people when the “real news” media protect you and dine with you to promote the latest fakery.

Mrs. Clinton’s cohorts love to point to what’s termed “Pizzagate” as an example of fake news, which is a story accusing Mrs. Clinton and her former campaign chairman John Podesta of engaging in a child sex ring from the back of pizza shops. Yeah. I kid you not. This is as fake as blaming a pre-meditated Islamist terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2012, on a YouTube video.

After Mrs. Clinton’s embarrassing failure (twice), she and her groupies have simply been working overtime looking for someone to blame other than themselves. “Fake news” they hope will malign new media in general as without it, revelations from WikiLeaks would not have reached so many.

While appearing at a ceremony honoring outgoing Sen. Harry Reid, Mrs. Clinton made a point of condemning “fake news”calling it an “epidemic” that had “flooded social media over the past year.”

In other words, pretty much everything that exposed her for being the fraud she is was somehow fake. “This is not about politics or partisanship. Lives are at risk. … It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly …,” she said. “It is imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.”

Mrs. Clinton, however, is actually right about fake news putting innocent lives at risk. We all now know the “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan was never uttered by Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prior to being shot by a police officer in 2014. In fact, Brown had been assaulting the officer and trying to take his firearm.

But the media propagated the falsehood, over and over again, leading to continual violence in Ferguson and arguably inciting violence against and the murder of police officers nationwide. The assassination of police officers around the country continues to this day.

And what has Mrs. Clinton had to say about this actually deadly fake news? Nothing.

The parade of fake news purveyors doesn’t stop with Mrs. Clinton. Brian Williams actually condemned “fake news” from his perch at MSNBC. This from the man who was removed from his job anchoring the “NBC Nightly News” for fabricating stories.

Dan Rather also chimed in. The disgraced former anchor of the “CBS Evening News” is now best known for presenting fake documents on “60 Minutes” smearing former President George W. Bush’s time with the Texas Air National Guard.

In an interview with Mr. Rather, the San Francisco Chronicle mused, “Rather sees fake news — various forms of misinformation made to look and feel like the real thing and given velocity by social media — as symptomatic of the nation’s creep toward a ‘post-truth’ political world, where rival factions can undercut even the most basic facts, seemingly with impunity.”

Well, he should know but, courtesy of blogs on the deplorable Internet, the truth eventually caught up with Mr. Rather.

Then, of course, there’s the ultimate in fake news, with Mrs. Clinton herself along with the president of the United States. The congressional Select Committee on Benghazi made it clear that within hours of the Benghazi attack, the Obama-Clinton administration knew it was a terrorist attack, yet both the president and Mrs. Clinton blamed the attack on a YouTube video, lied to families of the victims and to the American people (and the world) through a more-than-compliant media.

The Clintons learned early on about the danger of the Internet. In January 1998, the “real news” magazine Newsweek spiked a breaking story that President Bill Clinton was having an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. A few days later, the Internet upstart Drudge Report broke the news, instead. Perhaps Matt Drudge was Mrs. Clinton’s first deplorable.

Without Drudge, we never would have learned about the power of legacy media creating fake news by killing a story. The ultimate fake news is the void created when our Fifth Estate censors itself to please its favorite politicians.

Now, Mrs. Clinton, her cohorts, Never Trumpers and the political establishment are all latching onto their own fresh fake news: The Russians killed our election.

Yes, it appears the losers have added an element to the five stages of grief. Meet the new six stages of grief: denial, anger, the Russians did it, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Every day, Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats confirm the rightness of the outcome of the election. Calling into question the results with their paranoid, conspiracy-laden, unproven and unsourced claim of foreign intervention is missing only one thing — pizza.

• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.

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