For a moment, I thought the ascent of fake news might shock, maybe even shame, political debate back to facts and reality. Silly me.

Crying “fake news” has become just another tactic to avoid a fact-based argument.



The US president-elect, Donald Trump, did it this week after the revelation of the Russian intelligence dossier. It is true the allegations in the dossier had not been verified. There is a legitimate debate in the media about whether, and how fully, it should have been published.



But it was not fake news. Its was a real dossier and its contents were considered sufficiently credible for the Republican senator John McCain to pass it to the FBI and for federal officials to append a summary to their report to the president, Barack Obama, and Trump about claims of Russian hacking of Democrat emails during the 2016 election. It was a legitimate subject for questioning.



But the man who denies ever having said things that are actually in print, or recorded, and who routinely asserts things that are obviously and verifiably untrue, had found one more way to avoid being pinned down by questions. Just call it “fake news”.



On a much smaller scale, a similar tactic was employed in Australia over the summer break by the resources minister, Matt Canavan.



The ABC had run a series of stories about the Indian mining conglomerate Adani, to which the government is considering giving a $1bn subsidised loan to help build a rail line to what would be the biggest coal mine in Australia. It reported on the network of companies and trusts, many ultimately owned in tax havens, that lie behind the operation, as well as a number of continuing investigations by Indian authorities into alleged corruption –allegations denied by the company.



The minister appeared on the public broadcaster’s flagship morning radio program to claim the stories were “fake news” and lambast the ABC for even reporting them.



The presenter Kim Landers started by asking: “Were you aware of this investigation into the Adani group?” Canavan got straight to his point. “Well before I get to that question Kim, can I just thank you for having me on your program because I have been very disappointed in the ABC’s coverage of this issue in the past week. Your reports have been nothing but fake news.”



He didn’t actually answer many questions, after he’d finished sharing his views about the ABC’s journalism, saying only that the Indian investigation had not yet produced findings and that he had confidence in the board of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility, which would decide on the loan.



By alleging “fake news” and attacking the ABC, Canavan minimised the extent to which he had to engage with the issues raised. And the next day, many follow-up articles handily focused on the fake news claims rather than the substance of what had been reported.

But fake news is not any opinion with which a politician or publication disagrees, or any article that presents information they don’t like or that emphasises one part of a report when a minister would prefer to concentrate on another. It does not even refer to articles where a journalist may have made an error.



It is a term for fiction deliberately dressed up as fact. It’s stories manufactured for profit in Macedonia. It’s the manufactured child abuse allegations in the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy. The Guardian’s readers’ editor, Paul Chadwick, defines it this way: “fictions deliberately fabricated and presented as non-fiction with intent to mislead recipients into treating fiction as fact or into doubting verifiable fact.”



But instead of helping efforts to keep fact and fiction clearly separate, the charge of “fake news” is now being used to blur the delineation between them even further.



It used to go without saying. Facts and research would inform the arguments politicians used to try to convince people that one policy was better than another. They’d use emotion and rhetoric, and other methods of persuasion too, but their case had to be grounded in facts, and if it was shown not to be, they were usually toast.



Then we encountered “post-truth” politics, where politicians tried to explain away backflips or broken promises with implausible convolutions or where their rhetoric didn’t match their policies or widely accepted facts. But at least for the most part, there were still widely accepted facts to define the debate’s parameters.



Now we seem to be teetering on the verge of another phase altogether, where facts are fleeting whispy things that can change or disappear from one soundbite to another or be dismissed without discussion and, most alarmingly, where some voters no longer seem to care, because politics has become like reality television, which everyone knows isn’t really real anyway.



It’s also a world where resentment of “elites” slides into a resentment of “experts”, which leaves us just a short step from the rejection of expertise, a world where people who know things are derided, not only when they deserve to be for getting things wrong, but also on the grounds that expertise is no more valuable, no more worth listening to in democratic decision-making than conclusions reached through ignorance or misinformation or hunches or just telling people what they want to hear.



Democracy is built on the assumption that we mediate different ideas and worldviews to reach a majority position or a compromise, with facts as the agreed starting point, as the guide rails for the discussion, the ropes around the edge of the ring.



As alarming and astonishing as it may seem, that assumption is looking shaky.



Obama said it best this week: “Politics is a battle of ideas; in the course of a healthy debate, we’ll prioritise different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts; without a willingness to admit new information, and concede that your opponent is making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, we’ll keep talking past each other, making common ground and compromise impossible.”

We have to nail down and defend the principle that facts matter.

