It’s probably worth remembering that the term “fake news” has essentially no coherent meaning at this point.
It seems quaint now, but in 2016 when the term was publicized, it was very specific and direct: there was an epidemic of utterly fabricated political clickbait being shared from anonymous websites. Stories that were literally no more than unattributed fiction were widely circulated on social media, seen by millions, and a huge proportion of those people were taking them to be genuine (if politically motivated) news reporting.
Maybe at the time, it seemed like someone would do something if they pointed out that this was happening.
Of course, what someone did was immediately adopt the term to describe (what they saw as) low-quality, poorly-sourced, or overly-opinionated political reporting. And then a bunch of people who thought that reporting was actually pretty good started throwing the term back at what they thought was overly-opinionated, and suddenly the discourse was about bias in the mainstream media, and no one seemed to care much anymore about the tsunami of literal fantasies being deliberately spread by propagandists unknown.
Lots of words are meaningless the way certain people use them.
Personally, I don’t care. If the most popular use of a term is nonsensical, I use next most popular meaning that has some sensical usage.
I don’t buy this whole “you can’t use the words ‘racist’ or ‘cloud’ because they’re so overused as to be meaningless” thing. Words are (briefly) overused all the time. And then they’re not, and we can carry on using them according to their original purpose.
It seems quaint now, but in 2016 when the term was publicized, it was very specific and direct: there was an epidemic of utterly fabricated political clickbait being shared from anonymous websites. Stories that were literally no more than unattributed fiction were widely circulated on social media, seen by millions, and a huge proportion of those people were taking them to be genuine (if politically motivated) news reporting.
Maybe at the time, it seemed like someone would do something if they pointed out that this was happening.
Of course, what someone did was immediately adopt the term to describe (what they saw as) low-quality, poorly-sourced, or overly-opinionated political reporting. And then a bunch of people who thought that reporting was actually pretty good started throwing the term back at what they thought was overly-opinionated, and suddenly the discourse was about bias in the mainstream media, and no one seemed to care much anymore about the tsunami of literal fantasies being deliberately spread by propagandists unknown.