“Fake News”. It’s a term that has been coined by President Trump and has seemingly permeated every aspect of the political environment. Under Trump’s administration, the facts reported by mainstream media are accused as false in a perceived effort to bring more credibility to the questionable statements by the president. But how has “fake news” really affected the American public? Have US citizens really lost faith in media and forgotten how to differentiate fact from fiction? According to a new study released by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, it seems this answer falls along partisan lines.
The study on the news media in the United States found that 43% of respondents had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the press. 68% of Republicans had an unfavorable view in comparison to 18% of Democrats. And while this is actually not incredibly far off from previous years, what does stand out is that Americans are now so polarized that they cannot even agree on the definition of “fake news.”
The study found that Democrats agree more with the “original” definition of the phrase that emerged after the 2016 election, referring to fabricated news stories that are intended to deceive. Republicans, on the other hand, are more likely to have also adopted the meaning that Trump has ascribed to the term, which he often attaches to stories that he dislikes, regardless of whether or not they are factual.
Sam Gill, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities and impact, said that Trump’s constant use of the term made it “critical to try to understand what people hear when they hear that term and what people mean when they use that term.” Amidst all of the controversial statements that Trump makes, “fake news” is a term that seems to be evergreen for him. And if Democrats and Republicans have a completely different view of what those words even mean, then his constant use of the term will undoubtedly lead to further polarization.
“If the discussion about the role of the media and the value of the media becomes, in every way, a part of other kinds of polarized debates and competitions in our society,” Gill said, “that’s going to be ultimately quite problematic.”
Both Democrats and Republicans roughly agreed that “People knowingly portraying false information as if it were true” constitutes fake news. However, Republicans were much more likely to label news organizations they perceive as biased as fake news. In response to “News organizations slanting their stories to promote a certain point of view,” 53% of Republicans said that this always constituted fake news. And finally, Republicans were more likely to label news that they simply found disagreeable as “fake.” Asked to rate “Accurate news stories casting a politician or political group in a negative light,” 26% of Democrats said this always constitutes fake news in comparison to 42% of Republicans.
According to New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, these findings are troubling because they indicate that some “Republicans now see partisan beliefs as ‘fake,’ and they have also bought into Trump’s cult of personality credo that anything or anyone critiquing him is not real. The big takeaway is that Trump’s media marketing campaign is working, not just on his core, but on Republicans in general,” she said.