The Implications of Donald Trump’s Attacks on ‘Fake News’ Outlets

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump tweets a great deal about ‘fake news’ – more so than about political and policy issues that the President might be expected to focus on. This is even more pronounced if only those tweets likely written by Trump himself (rather than a staffer) are considered. ‘Fake news’ epithets are especially often directed against some of the mainstream media that have been especially critical of Trump, and they often occur especially after there are major new developments in the investigation of the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interests. ‘Fake news’ is therefore used as a reputation management device for Trump.

This signals an end to ‘White House’ metonymy: the White House no longer stands for the Presidency or Trump as President, as White House statements are sometimes directly contradicting or contradicted by Trump tweets. And of course these tweets disrupt political coverage by the mainstream media: these tweets are certainly newsworthy in their unprecedented attacks on a free media, but are also cheap to cover and might direct media scrutiny away from more crucial policy issues.

One effect of these ‘fake news’ attacks is that Democrats and Republicans now understand the term very differently, and have highly divergent views towards the mainstream media. This is deeply problematic for American political discourse, and the role of the President as a self-imposed arbiter of what is and is not ‘fake news’ is itself a major concern.