The New York Times aired its concern over various dictators appropriating one of President Donald Trump’s favorite terms, “fake news,” seemingly forgetting that Democrats were the ones who initially popularized the phrase.
“When Amnesty International released a report about prison deaths in Syria, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, retorted that ‘we are living in a fake-news era,'” TheNYT piece reads. “President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who is steadily rolling back democracy in his country, blamed the global media for ‘lots of false versions, lots of lies,’ saying ‘this is what we call ‘fake news’ today.'”
While Trump has certainly taken the narrative surrounding “fake news” and weaponized it for his own use, Democrats first started using the term when referring to fictitious news stories planted on social media to confuse or misinform potential voters.
Facebook CEO and Democratic donor Mark Zuckerberg used the term at the Techonomy conference Nov. 11, 2016, which led to the term spiking in Google results. Since Zuckerberg’s speech, the phrase became increasingly used by mainstream news outlets and Democratic commentators.
TheNYT opted to quote a Dutch member of the European Parliament, Marietje Schaake, about Trump’s appropriation of the term, rather than an American member of Congress.
“Trump doesn’t only talk about fake news, but attacks the media as fake news, and that’s an attack on the free press,” Schaake told TheNYT. “As the leader of a country that traditionally defends human rights, that’s very serious, and of course it has a major impact worldwide.”
In recent weeks, mainstream media outlets have printed a number of articles featuring major factual errors and heightening tension between the White House and the press.
Trump lashed out on Twitter Wednesday about a study showing that 90 percent of all media coverage about him in the last three months has been negative.
Despite this alleged bias, TheNYT included remarks from John Lloyd, a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, who claims that the president “has succeeded in building an alternative reality separate from the mainstream media’s efforts at democratic, rational politics.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.