maybe not such a great success as he says www.washingtonpost.com/[...] his real skill is self advertizing. read once that he would have earned more if invested money with securities company. and the thing many of the prolls dont realize is he dont give a monkeys toss about them. he jsut sees the likes of us as cow to be milked

'Fake news' seems to have 2 meanings: (1) lies, or anyway extraordinary distortions of fact; (2) the sort of thing you can read about the lives of actors in movie magazines, or about the Kardashians (whoever they are), but applied to political events or personalities (then there's (3), a combination of both). Probably best to be clear about the difference, and then try to get serious about who lies to whom, why, and when what is really important. The media are not the only ones at fault - way too many people have been believing the lies they want to believe, and persuading themselves that a lot of BS is important, for way too long ('conditioning' or 'indoctrination', if you want to take on a conspiracy theory with some value to it). The idea that it's all 'liberal' (Americanese - for non-Americans, read 'conservative'; or perhaps 'narrow conservative 2', as opposed to 'narrow conservative 1' (then there's 'libertarian', a conservatism hidden from itself' (i.e., far from 'anarchist')) aimed at Trump is inaccurate (many politicians' statements to the press produce it daily, in both forms). Trump's tweets as well.

Who cares? America is doing great as promised for once.

@vicar: Note that the thread was once about an article about China on Australian media (I guess - or is yahoo australia owned/controlled by yahoo, which is owned mostly by yanks? or is it? Who's running this show?). I thought the term 'fake news' needed to be clarified, regardless of who's using it. Then I strayed, like several previous; now everybody has to hear Americans talk about America, regardless of original topic.
Although the significance of subjects for discussion doesn't necessarily maintain nationalist borders, surely they must get tired of us once in a while.

the world is not a reality tv show where points make prizes. it is easy to forget that millions of people suffer and die every year to maintain the status quo, and that we are part of the problem

sounds like the tittle of a michael moore movie

Fake news, biased news, tweaked news....it's always been there. Do your own research if you are that concerned about something...it's only an issue if you let it be one. I mean, I wasn't there, so it's no use asking me.

when the press is the watchdog of governemnt and then there is a sustained attack on the press, and we aint talking tabloids here, then look for parrallels in history and around the world. if what you see is not cause for concern, then i don know what is. and if you believe the liikes of brietbart before you believe the established media, then i don know again

@dazzer: Yes, but we also have to think about sustained attacks by the owners/controllers of the press - who, thanks to their positions and vested interests, rarely go without their own agendas - on the ability of the ordinary person to think straight. (Note: see Noam Chomsky's MANUFACTURING CONSENT (about 1987); see Edward Bernays' (Freud's nephew) PROPAGANDA (about 1930), who thought it was a bad idea to just let the ordinary person think for him/herself. Bernays was an inspiration to Goebbels - more worrying today, he probably had more to do with the rise of US advertising and electoral political strategy than any other single individual. Different ways to skin cats. None of this is irrelevant today).
And then there's the problem of people lying to themselves.
It's a long tricky question, and one of the more worrying results of it has been the attitude which many people seem to have, or maybe used to have, that when something appears in print it's either objective fact or is based on some impartial weighing of simple objective facts. I once knew a Hungarian woman back when Hungary was dominated by the Soviet Union who became visibly worried when told that many Americans simply believe in what they read in TIME Magazine. Her comment was that everyone in Hungary read the newspapers daily and was too savvy just to believe in printed words, and well understood how to read between the lines.
The ultimate watchdog on power can only be the people, an informed people, and, given what they are up against, that is no simple matter.