It stands to reason that Republicans nationwide would rush to adopt Dear Leader's most famous propaganda tic.
An Idaho state lawmaker urges her constituents to submit entries for her "fake news awards." The Kentucky governor tweets #FAKENEWS to dismiss questions about his purchase of a home from a supporter. An aide to the Texas land commissioner uses the phrase to downplay the significance of his boss receiving donations from employees of a company that landed a multimillion-dollar contract.
President Donald Trump's campaign to discredit the news media has spread to officials at all levels of government, who are echoing his use of the term "fake news" as a weapon against unflattering stories.
And that's the thing; the Republican move is to claim "fake news" against merely unflattering stories. As with Trump, the term is used to delegitimize the press when the press catches individual Republican lawmakers doing something that smacks of corruption. The Republican Party has come to the conclusion, whether individually or collectively, that they would rather burn down the free press itself than face questions about their own conduct. Trump may have given them the facile, nasal screech to do it, but the decision to follow that lead is their own.
The end result? Largely, the same notion Fox News has been promoting for a decade. Truth is what you say it is, and can be altered by someone who shouts louder. It is the same dynamic that allowed serial news-faker James O'Keefe to promote multiple "scandals" pieced together from footage edited to claim whatever he wanted it to claim. It is the same methodology used by Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly in demonizing whichever opponent needed demonizing at the time. It is a staple of the Sean Hannity Screamy-Shouty Show. It became synonymous with the far-right, and then synonymous with the Republican Party itself, and now everything from Russia election hacking to possible corruption by bit-part cronies in bit-part offices is, we are told, nothing but illusions peddled by the movement's enemies.
We've run out of ways to describe how deeply dangerous this is. It is demonstrably the venue of authoritarians. The slow suffocation of accurate information in favor of information more pleasing to those in power is how democracies turn into something else.
[Brendan Nyhan] was among the authors of a recent study for the Poynter Institute that found partisan divisions in the public's attitudes toward the press. More Democrats now have more faith in the press, while Republicans have far more negative views and are "more likely to endorse extreme claims about media fabrication, to describe journalists as an enemy of the people, and to support restrictions on press freedom," the study found.
Describing nonpartisan reporting on embarrassing or potentially corrupt acts by ideological allies as acts of an enemy of the people is not compatible with American democracy. It's understandable that some small subset of Americans—to be clear, stupid people—would gravitate toward those conspiracy-minded explanations, but it is not some small subset of Americans. It is Republicanism, the brand and the party. It is a core tenet of Fox News programming, and uttered by Republican officeholders, and shrieked about by a president buried in gaudy scandals. It is unsustainable and either the party or democracy will, in the end, crack.