Yet this nugget from a new Gallup-Knight Foundation survey just about knocked the Erik Wemple Blog out of a decade-long media-research torpor:
Four in 10 [or 42 percent of] Republicans consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be “fake news.” [The corresponding figure for Democrats is 17 percent.]
I’m not sure how one is supposed to have a productive dialogue with a group when nearly half of them are in constant denial about objective reality.
I think I knew something like this was true intuitively, just by the way the term is bandied about so carelessly, but it’s nonetheless disheartening to see some numbers behind the trend.
This is enervating. I get being like “Stories may be accurate but are nonetheless political.” But that’s not fake news.