Mike Snider

USA TODAY





Journalists and news consumers, along with tech companies such as Facebook, can take steps to temper the fake news phenomenon.

But how much progress can be made should the country's head newsmaker himself continue to be among those fueling the fake news fire?

At his first public press conference in nearly six months, President-elect Donald Trump this past Wednesday called CNN a purveyor of "fake news" because the TV network had produced a story reporting that the U.S. intelligence officials had presented Trump and President Obama with allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have unverified, but potentially compromising personal and financial information on the president-elect.

Media observers, as well as journalists at competing outlets — including Fox News' Shepard Smith — agreed that CNN's manner of covering the story met with journalistic standards.

CNN and other news organizations noted that the allegations were unverified, but the situation itself amounts to a news story, says Ed Wasserman, dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, because "what matters is that our intelligence community believes Russia is sufficiently adversarial toward us that they would make an effort (to) ... compile this."

The situation cranks up the pressure on an already volatile atmosphere caused by months of hyper-politicized activity online — and in the physical world — during the election cycle and subsequent post-campaign environment. Mainstream journalists feel as if they are under fire, while their readers and viewers get defensive. At the same time, Trump supporters feel not only vilified, but validated.

Trump invokes 'fake news' at press conference

And Trump is not wrong when he points out that the U.S. intelligence community is not infallible. "The problem with our informational environment, the news ecosystem right now is it is so polluted and so contaminated with falsity that Trump supporters can with justice point to the unreliability of this ecosystem to deliver straight and verifiable news," Wasserman said.

But some wonder whether Trump may be seeking to gain an advantage from the situation — turning fake news on its head — to sow confusion among the citizenry. By attacking the mainstream media as incapable of truth-saying, the President-elect advances the so-called post-truth era.

The CNN declaration is only Trump's latest attack on the media. After the recent Golden Globes Award speech by Meryl Streep, in which the three-time Oscar winner encouraged the support of media, Trump on Twitter called her "over-rated" and cited the "dishonest media." During the waning days of the election campaign, Trump called the media "dishonest" for burying stories about the FBI's ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton.

But it's not just Trump who has attempted to co-opt the fake news phenomenon. Some supporters and alt-right news outlets helped go viral false stories including those that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and that Clinton & Co. were running a child sex ring from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.

Man fires rifle in D.C. restaurant at center of fake-news conspiracy theories

The Pope Francis story was the most read and shared story on Facebook during the final three months of the campaign, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed. Fake news is rampant on social media with about one-third (32%) of Americans saying they often see made-up political news stories there, according to the Pew Research Center.

Even more, 63%, say that fake news creates "great confusion" among the public about current events, the survey found. An additional 24% said fake news causes some confusion. Why could this be so important? Because about half (47%) of all Americans get some news from Facebook, Pew found in an earlier study.

"Now that anyone - including our president-elect — is a publisher via social media, newsrooms are competing with non-newsrooms," said Jessica Pucci, professor of ethics and excellence in journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University. "Trump certainly uses this to his advantage — he can reach audiences directly rather than using the media as a conduit."

The advantage is that "our nation's leadership has never been more raw and accessible," she said, but added "it's troubling that the president-elect calls 'fake news' in one breath, and in the next breath shares unverified or unverifiable information in the next, such as saying the Affordable Care Act will 'soon be history' (on Friday). To my knowledge, it's impossible to verify the future."

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Even more concerning is the propaganda potential for Trump and supporters to lead to action. In the case of the Washington, D.C., "pizzagate" conspiracy, an armed man showed up looking to investigate and fired his gun inside.

When Trump criticizes the media, is he acting in the mode of Vladimir Putin, as Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev posits in a recent column entitled "A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media" on Medium.com. "Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook," he writes.

Or is Trump simply a bit more obstinate that Obama, who regularly dissed Fox News? "Now you’re experiencing what we have been living," Fox News' Neil Cavuto said on-air Thursday.

When he verbally attacks the media could that lead to attacks on reporters (some verbal and physical attacks were reported during campaign rallies)? And Trump's tweeted reference to the Nazi Germany treatment he got from the intelligence community for leaking the "dossier" on him -- the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper subsequently issued a statement that the agencies did not leak it -- is Trump trying to suggest we are in a modern day Nazi-esque regime?

Recall that Trump supporters began to invoke the German phrase “Lügenpresse,” which means “lying press," at rallies in October.

Trump is treading on dangerous ground, but he's not dictatorial, says Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, author of Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand. "Fake news played a massively important role both in the rise of Hitler and the conduct of the Nazi regime," he said. "My view of Trump is darker than it was four months ago because of his tendency to invent political fictions and fables. He is a conscious fake news merchant, or a fantasist," he said. "Without a shadow of a doubt Trump is a master manufacturer of fake news and the ideal representative for our post-truth society. But the Nazis did it before him and far more ruthlessly and on a huge scale -- they had groups to spread rumors, groups to spread graffiti, they produced fake horoscopes. Even with the resource of cyberspace we have nothing to compare!"

Speaking of the online sphere, Facebook has said it is taking steps to tackle fake news and plans to build better working relationships with established media to improve the user experience on the network.

Media consumers can do their part, too. "Going forward people have to think for themselves. That is what this election is teaching us. Fake news is not people reporting facts you don’t want to hear," said Nsenga Burton, digital editor for Grady Newsource and an instructor at the University of Georgia's Cox Media Institute for Journalism, Innovation & Management.

News consumers need to consider what "does it really mean to be a journalist," Burton said. The majority of traditional TV stations, newspapers and news organizations — and their online components — are complex businesses that collect and distribute news, she said. "The media is not some person sitting in the basement posting whatever comes to their mind at two in the morning. We have to get busy being real with ourselves why are we OK with the mountains of lies being pushed out."

Meanwhile, media outlets have begun to confront the issue, for instance, with the BBC creating a team to debunk fake news stories."In four years, we may look back and say this is the best coverage of an administration we’ve ever seen," said Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, "because we’ve really had to apply some creativity and some muscle to it in ways we haven’t had to before because stuff had come easily."

Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.