
President Donald Trump is trying to make a point about fake news by saying that the Obama White House is responsible for the rise in fake news.
He’s right.
The Obama administration, after all, was the first to adopt a fake news policy in 2013, as the Huffington Post’s David Fahrenthold noted.
It was the administration’s chief propagandist, Andrew Breitbart, who famously coined the term “fake news” to describe the kind of content that gets passed off as real news.
This strategy has been the subject of scrutiny ever since, but it has been widely overlooked, perhaps because the real scandal here is that fake news is the result of the administration working with the most right-wing outlet in the United States.
And this is the administration that took the Obama campaign to court in the Supreme Court and ultimately won.
Now, there are some things that are completely unacceptable in the 21st century, but the administration of President Donald J. Trump, despite having such a record of promoting fake news, has been willing to use this tactic to push its agenda on the American public.
That’s because Trump and his administration have been so focused on their own brand of “alternative facts” that they’re not even bothering to look at the facts.
Trump is not only wrong about the fact that his administration is responsible in the rise and spread of fake stories, he is also wrong about what’s actually happening in the news media.
Trump’s fake news war Trump has been particularly effective at driving fake news to the forefront of American life in recent years, as a direct result of his aggressive and sometimes even reckless use of social media.
But the Obama years weren’t the first time the president used his social media powers to spread fake news stories and misinformation.
As Fahrenstold notes, the Obama team’s strategy had been around since at least 2008, when the administration began working with BuzzFeed, a news organization that is notorious for its use of fake and hoax news.
The strategy worked.
In fact, BuzzFeed was so successful in its efforts that, by the time Trump took office, its share of the total traffic on the website was nearly 40 percent.
The administration of then-President Barack Obama is also infamous for its anti-fake-news strategy, with outlets like the New York Times and The Washington Post seeing the White House as a haven from the Obama coalition.
And while the Obama strategy may have worked well for BuzzFeed, it’s important to remember that the strategy has also served Trump’s purposes well, and that it was only a matter of time before the Trump administration followed suit.
The Trump administration’s fake-news obsession is not confined to BuzzFeed, of course.
It’s been used by the White Trumpet on Fox News, by Fox’s chief strategist, Sean Hannity, to push his own agenda and the administration itself has used the same tactic to peddle the White White House’s narrative about a national emergency.
In the process, the Trump team has spread misinformation on a scale that is hard to comprehend.
But it is, in part, thanks to fake news itself.
And in part it’s thanks to Trump’s own use of the fake-related phrase “alternate facts.”
It is worth noting that this tactic was also used during the George W. Bush administration.
In 2007, the Bush administration worked closely with fake news outlets like Infowars and The Drudge Report to promote its agenda, including the spread of a fake story about the death of Osama bin Laden.
And the same year, the New Yorker published an article claiming that Bush’s National Guard had used an illegal search warrant to kill the U.S. ambassador to Libya, the United Arab Emirates.
The New Yorker story was widely reported and picked up by Fox News and other right-leaning outlets, but Fox News’ owner, Rupert Murdoch, quickly fired off a statement saying that he had no knowledge of the story.
And then there was the infamous 2008 “dossier,” which purported to be a compilation of unverified allegations against Trump that were spread by an anonymous source.
The story spread like wildfire, but Trump had already dismissed it as “fake” and had already called it a “scam” in an interview with Sean Hannity.
When Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had been caught making unsubstantiated allegations about the Clinton Foundation, Trump and Manafort tried to use the issue to rally his base.
And just like the Obama days, Trump’s strategy is now being used against him by his own administration.
Trump has taken the fake news and fake-based information that has come to dominate the American political landscape and is now using it to bolster his own campaign narrative about the Clintons and their “crimes.”
Trump is the only president to use it in the same way as he has for the past eight years.
And he’s doing so in a way that has not only served his own political ends, but has