Unrelated: I am out of Gin. I need more Gin.
I might be going crazy here, but people were harping endlessly on Trump's seemingly non-sequitur of "The leaks were real, but the news was fake" (timestamp 00:44:40). It sounds crazy (and it is) and contradictory, but I think I understood what he meant.
Remember the whole Death Panels thing years ago? The Fox propaganda machine took an idea that had some basis in fact and tried to spin it into a wild breaking news story, and then did the same thing with every hot-topic news story that would make Obama look bad: take a small story and whip it up into a big news story to discredit the current Administration.
Trump's position here is that the media is reporting the wrong stuff. The news may be true (the leaks are real), but Trump doesn't want the media to report it because it would present the people with a message that he doesn't want them to hear. If the Trump admin wants to control how the people are informed, then they would have to power to define what is real (real news) and what is untrue or not in-line with the Admin's messaging (fake news).
In fact, he even refers to that idea in the same session: that the news sites are filled with hatred against him, which they shouldn't be doing because he won.
So when he says that CNN reports Fake News, what he means is that they are reporting news that he does not approve of. Trump wants his government to decide what the media reports on and what they get to say. When Kelly Anne Conway says "We might have to rethink our relationship with the media," this is what she means.
You know who does that? North Korea. China. Russia. It's fucking crazy, and if Trump attempts to shut down the Internet and Social Media the way he has talked about in the past, we might see the grand return of the underground Print Media.
Nostalgia
As I'm writing this article (which started out as a Facebook Comment and lengthened into an article because it turns out I have more to say), I am reminded of my College days when I wrote articles for my college newspaper The Broadside. At that time (1986-1988), the Student Council that was so incredibly corrupt that over half the council members were ejected for using Student Council funds for a Get-Rich pyramid scheme (you can actually read about this here, published by fellow writer Keith Waddington).
I personally sat in a Council meeting where they openly discussed using the college money to buy alcohol on a student trip and disguise the expense as getting theatre tickets. So when I wrote an article in The Broadside about what I witnessed, the Student Council demanded that they get to approve articles before they could be publish. We we refused this request, they defunded the The Broadside and took our room away. The College Administration was happy to see us go because we were critical of them as well.
But The Broadside didn't go away. We went underground and continued to publish the paper with a limited printing (funded by secret donors), and our supporters helped us with distribution by sharing the paper person-to-person. Any copy that the Student Council president found was ripped up and I was personally threatened with physical violence several times. Of course, this only strengthened my resolve and gave birth to my backbone.
With a dictatorial administration in power, this may be the rebirth of the Print Media industry with an underground, community-driven financial and distribution system. Mark my words.
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