Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’s latest attack on journalism (I blogged a bit about this in “More Evidence That, to Trump, ‘Fake News’ Means Critical News“).
CNN’s Chris Cillizza
Trump either doesn’t understand or ignores the difference between a story he doesn’t like and one that is not true. He conflates the two for his own political purposes — knowing his base hates the media and is more than ready to believe that journalists are willing to make up stories just to make Trump look bad.
Time and time again, Trump’s claims about “fake news” have been debunked. What he calls fake news isn’t fake at all. It’s true — he just doesn’t like to read about it because it paints him as fallible, and he hates that.[…]Trump’s attacks on the media — as flawed and dishonest as they are — are working. More than 4 in 10 people in a Gallup poll earlier this year could not name a single objective news source. Almost eight in 10 (77%) in a Monmouth University poll released last month said TV and print media report “fake news.” That’s a 14-point bump from the number of people who said the same last year. } The media is not blameless in all of this. As I noted above, we do make mistakes. We have made major strides in transparency but need to do even more to show our work to people. The more open we are about how we do our jobs, the better chance we have of convincing people that our most basic commitment is to getting stories right, not pushing some sort of imagined ideological agenda. | But, it’s also important for people to understand what’s behind Trump’s aggressive anti-media campaign. Trump is about Trump. He calls media “fake news” because the coverage of him isn’t as positive as he would like. —Donald Trump just accidentally revealed something very important about his ‘fake news’ attacks
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