yawn

Can't the Americans expand their sphere any more than relating everything back to their president. This has been going on a year now, at least.

There must be forums where this can be discussed backwards and forwards with people who like to hear it and with who it resonates. It doesn't have any place on a China related forum for an international audience. It's tedious.

@ Napoleon: I think it might be considered 'fake news' - anyway, a dangerously distorted version of reality - for the international media to focus overwhelmingly on the US connection to every news event. Not saying said connections are not important - they very often are - or that there should not be a focus for specialists of many sorts on 'the US connection' or 'the Trump connection' - but when the picture of the world so widely presented is one that stresses US interests, concerns, responsibilities, advantages, etc. etc. to the point of nearly ignoring other contexts... and this largely is what occurs, thanks largely to the US domination of world media.
Hmm. Perhaps this is less than clear. But take yahoo, for example: it's used worldwide, yet when one goes to yahoo one gets: homepage - under which is: news - under which is: world news - i.e., 'world news' is presented as a subset of 'news', which is mostly about the US and international events; and then 'world news' is about international events and the US.
It seems national focus and international reality are attempting to swallow each other - and maybe that's what they really are doing. In this game, Trump becomes a fuzzy metaphor thought to be an actual person, a symbol of something called 'America', a hurricane of ominous activity...one thinks of Ahab and the damned white whale, about which Ahab was occasionally very clear in his madness: "It's not about the whale, which is just a mask; the point is to strike THROUGH the mask." But then Ahab had a problem with God, and it behooves us to remember that Donald Trump is really just another dude.
mea culpa, I have rambled.

@alienew
yahoo.com is US centric. If you nav to the UK version of Yahoo, you'll absolutely see a less US dominated collection of information portals. I'm assuming the same is true for Yahoo Japan, DEU, FRA, ITA etc.

Whether or not those portals have localized FAKE NEWS - I wouldn't know - not familiar with the cultures and behaviors of those countries - except for Japan, where FAKE NEWS is also pervasive and commonly known - example the Japanese government's repeated contentions that ground crops from the Fukushima (nuclear power plant meltdown) area are now safe for human consumption...wink wink...nudge nudge...

@Michael: OK, I've perhaps overstated, but the fact remains that people in many countries rely on rather few news sources for international news, and most of those are associated with rather few world power centers, and the US is not the least significant among them. The source that reports honestly about Des Moines will not necessarily report honestly about Havana.
Anyway, your Japanese example: I'd be suspicious too, but how do you presume to know it's FAKE? And what do you mean by FAKE - simply a lie? Governments lie all the time, more often they distort in other ways, and they often behave like advertising concerns, whose primary job is to manipulate people to do things, not to inform them or reason with them - but in many places journalists question their claims - and yes, journalists may consciously falsify also. But then you don't really expect to find ANY source that you can simply call TRUTH, do you? If so, which one and why? Although in many instances it may not be all that important, there can never be a perfect line drawn between information and interpretation, whether the source, reporter, editor and publisher are clear-minded, honest, informed and competent or not.
I think you're more likely to find an honest journalist than an honest publisher or government spokesman, but we have to remember that there are few whose job requirements begin and end with telling the truth, and even then the task requires more than simply the will to do so.
Why do I write these things? I must be bored today.

Well, if anyone has had enough of fake news there’s always ‘Fire and Fury’ to get stuck into. Failing that, then how about Harry Potter?

The paradigm of fake news was the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction stories published in the mainstream media. Ironic that it's the same MSM trying to recover lost ground by witchhunting blogs, alternative news sites and random twittered as fake news

cloudtrapezer's got it once again. I must learn conciseness.
Note that the WPD excuse for invading Iraq appeared across the media spectrum, at least in the US, including in both what some contributors here want to call 'liberal' or even 'left' (e.g., NYT) and 'conservative' or 'right' (which some want to pretend is objective or honest or something - you know, like Fox News) outlets.
As I've pointed out, I think the term FAKE NEWS!, which, I admit, has sort of a nice simplistic ring to it, ought to be defined a bit more carefully, as we consider the question of better alternatives, which may put greater demands on the reader.

The example of the weapons of mass destruction is a very bad one. Cloudtrapezer makes it looks like it was an invention of the mainstream media while it was not. It was created by the US government and seconded by the British. The creator of this fake news where government institutions who said the intel was coming from their official intel sources and was further classified. What do you expect the MSM to do; call the Iraqi ministry of information for a confirmation? Yes Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf here: no we don’t have these WoMD here, have a nice day.
The MSM never claimed that they had found out about the WoMD but simply reported what the government told them.
The only thing you can blame them off is that they were used by their governments to spread fake news. (And again fake news they could not verify and that was part of a government plot to spin reality).
This was probably a lesson for the proper media to not belief everything the government tried to make them belief.

@Mengna: No, Cloudtrapezer doesn't present the WMDs-in-Iraq story as an invention of the mainstream media - we are all, roughly, aware of where it came from, and why, and how.
Your last sentence above is certainly correct, but I think it's a lesson they, as professional journalists who are not totally naive, might well have picked up over the past several hundred years of journalistic coverage of government blather, informed by several thousand years of historical reflection on what government is about and on what governments do and what kind of people like to run them and why.
It's fine to report what a government says; it's ridiculous to present it as fact; if governments were the only source of information and if their analyses (or pretended analyses) were the only ones available, we'd be in even more serious trouble than we are.
Back to the OP: yeah, some good questions - better than the ones all over front pages as the US visibly, month after month, built up its forces in preparation for expanding its ME occupation, which had been advancing since the first Gulf War a quarter of a century ago, if not before.