< With 'Fake News,' Trump Moves From Alternative Facts To Alternative Language

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Fake news - President Trump treats it like a plague even as it has become one of his main talking points. Here are just a few instances of his using the phrase recently.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm changing it from fake news though.

UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: Doesn't that undermine...

TRUMP: Very fake news.

I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news.

This is fake news put out by the media.

It's all fake news. It's all fake news. The nice thing is, I see it starting to turn.

SHAPIRO: The question is, turned from what to what? With some analysis is NPR's political reporter Daniel Kurtzleben. Hey, Daniel.

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey.

SHAPIRO: When the phrase fake news was born last year, it referred to stories that were completely fabricated from whole cloth to deceive voters. I mean, there was a fake news story that Tom Hanks had endorsed Donald Trump. He didn't. The way Donald Trump is using the phrase fake news seems a little different from that.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, more than a little different. It's very different. I mean, like you said, fake news used to refer to these stories, you know, made up by Macedonian teenagers, for example, that totally didn't reflect at all what was going on.

Donald Trump, however, seems to point it at any story that is unfavorable towards him. He even had this one tweet where he said that negative polls are fake news. So, yes, it's very different from the way it used to be used.

SHAPIRO: If he's using the term fake news to mean news I don't like, so what? What does that matter?

KURTZLEBEN: Let me zoom out to a really big theoretical level. I called up linguist George Lakoff to explain to me what exactly is so special about the word fake. And here's the example he used. He used the word gun. You can put a whole bunch of different kinds of words in front of it, you know - black or gray or big or whatever. But you still have a gun. That is, it still does what it's intended to do. It still shoots. But you take the word fake. You put it in front of gun. Suddenly, you have a fake gun i.e. a gun that doesn't do what is supposed to do. It doesn't shoot. It can still intimidate you, but it can't do what it's meant to do.

SHAPIRO: So you apply that to news, and you can have good news, bad news, biased news, unfair news. It's still grounded in reality, but fake news undermines the basic function of news. Is that what he's arguing here?

KURTZLEBEN: Right. You could add that it goes a step further with the word news, right? The point of news is to be real - is to be factual. You put fake in front of it and, suddenly, you've pulled the carpet out from underneath it.

SHAPIRO: So what does that mean for free press, for democracy that the president is using the phrase in this way?

KURTZLEBEN: So if the whole point of the media is to hold everyone else - all the different branches of government accountable, then taking away the media's credibility can be really dangerous. That's what GOP strategist Frank Luntz told me.

FRANK LUNTZ: While I have differences from time to time with what people report, I am an advocate of media. It's essential to the health of our democracy. That simple criticism can be rejected for its lack of credibility is deeply problematic.

SHAPIRO: Does it give the phrase fake news a little too much credit to say that it's responsible for undermining the credibility of the media? I mean, a lot of things are undermining the credibility of the media these days, including in some instances the media's behavior on its own.

KURTZLEBEN: You're totally right. But the problem is that you have these two different groups of people using the phrase in two very different ways. One example is a right-leaning website called The Federalist. It recently put out a list of stories that it called fake news that have been published since Donald Trump took office. But this list went so far as to call some stories that had run corrections later fake news. So think about that. If a story is fake, it's trying to deceive you. If I run a correction on a story, I'm trying to give you better information. That would make it seem like not fake news.

You could argue that this is sort of symbolic of broader problems, right? You have two different groups of people using the phrase fake news in two different ways right now. Listen, throughout the election there was all of this talk about all of us being in our different bubbles, right? If we're using language in different ways from each other, it implies that we're also living in kind of different realities from each other in an even greater way, and that is a little bit scary.

SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks, Danielle.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Thank you.

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