ABSTRACT
The application of the term 'fake news' to a piece of journalistic information is easy to embed in a Facebook post or a 140-character tweet. Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' for understanding the behaviour of western news media remains hugely influential. By late 2016, 'fake news' had become a meme of sorts, spreading virally as a vast array of political actors deployed it against perceived enemies in the media. By early 2017, as the Donald John Trump presidency commenced, the term 'fake news' had become ubiquitous in the globalised public sphere. Information—or misinformation—has always been an important weapon of ideological warfare, and fake news can be seen as one particular form of a more generally utilised battery of information warfare tools. The rise of fake news is part of a wider crisis of public trust in, and legitimacy of, media and political elites which has driven the ascendancy of populist politicians such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Rodrigo Duterte.
