While President Trump has made it a household word in his attack on establishment media, “fake news” has been around for awhile, with supermarket tabloids reporting of alien encounters and tyrannical regimes pumping out propaganda.
Now, a journalist group says it wants to control the use of that term by trademarking it.
If successful, the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists would be able to restrict who uses that term and how it is applied.
The Hill reported the Florida journalists note 40% of Republicans think the term “applies to accurate reporting that casts politicians they support in a negative light.”
But the application is unlikely to be approved, The Hill said, citing reporter Emily Bloch, who explained the intent is to compel people to “think about what fake news is, and what it means to them.”
“This is satire. It’s a joke. But it’s a joke with a point, and as any student of public discourse will tell you, a joke sometimes hits harder than the truth,” wrote Bloch in an op-ed in Teen Vogue.
She makes clear her disdain for Trump and his application of the term to establishment media.
“And if anyone accuses us of trolling the president, well, nothing else seems to work with him, so what do we have to lose?” she said.
Bloch wrote that the SPJ branch already “is sending Donald Trump cease and desist letters over the use of the term ‘fake news.'”
She complains Trump is “constantly devaluing our work.”
“President Donald Trump using the term ‘fake news’ so freely is something my colleagues and I find really troubling. And it’s not just the nature of Trump’s use of the term; it’s the volume too. According to Factba.se, a site launched to track the president’s public comments, Trump has referenced the term over 1,200 times since he took office, making for an average of more than once a day,” she wrote.
She said the term “threatens the livelihood of healthy discourse within a democracy. According to a study by the Knight Foundation and Gallup, American trust in the media is at an all-time low.”
She said her organization, the Florida Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, is “trying to stop Trump from calling everything he doesn’t like ‘fake news’ in a way that even a businessman as self-obsessed as Trump can understand: trademark law.”
