Last December, Variety and other news outlets reported that Donald Trump planned to serve as executive producer of "The Celebrity Apprentice" while he was president. Kellyanne Conway, appearing on CNN, defended the president-elect's prerogatives, but the next day Trump tweeted that the story was "fake news." Since then, he has tweeted fake news more than one hundred and fifty times; on a single day in September, he did so eight times, in apparent frustration with the coverage of his administration's response to Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico. And, of course, Trump regularly invokes “the fake news story about Russian collusion,” as he called it last summer. He has attacked coverage of the Russia investigation more than a dozen times on Twitter alone. “One of the biggest terms I can think of is 'fake,'” Trump said on Mike Huckabee's talk show in October. (In fact, the phrase “fake news” has been around for more than a century.) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The president's strategy was successful, however, in at least one respect: He appropriated a term that had often been used to describe the propaganda and lies masquerading as news, from Russia and elsewhere, that proliferated on Facebook , YouTube and other social media platforms during the 2016 campaign. These fabricated stories, including “POPE FRANCIS SHOCKS THE WORLD, SUPPORTS DONALD TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT,” poisoned the news ecosystem and may have contributed to Trump's victory . Judging by the president's tweets, he doesn't like his credible definition of "fake news." But he complicates the issue by making blatantly false statements that inevitably make headlines. Trump has brought to the White House bully pulpit a disorienting habit of telling lies, large and small, without obvious shame. Since 2015, Politifact has counted three hundred and twenty-nine public statements by Trump that it judges to be mostly or entirely false. (By comparison, the number of such inaccuracies by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is thirteen.) The president also publicizes slander that defames minorities. Last Wednesday morning he outdid himself by retweeting incendiary, unverified anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of Britain First, a far-right group. Through a spokesperson, Prime Minister Theresa May responded that Trump was "wrong" in promoting the agenda of a group that spreads "hateful narratives that peddle lies." The next day, members of Parliament denounced the president, using epithets such as “fascist” and “stupid.” It was an unprecedented scene in the centuries-old military alliance between the United States and Great Britain. Trump's tactics echo those of previous nativist-populist politicians, but his tweets also draw on contemporary idioms of the alt-right. It is a broad movement, as researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis wrote, best understood as “an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, techno-libertarians, white nationalists, men's rights advocates, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration activists and bored youth” who express “a self-referential culture in which anti-Semitism, occult connections and Nazi imagery can be explained away as entirely sincere or entirely ironic.” Trump is no fanatic of far-right digital news, but his Twitter feed is equally ambiguous. He seems to provoke his opponents for the pleasure of offending them, but when called to answer he often claims that he was alonejoking. He sometimes promotes conspiracy theories to insult personal nemeses, as he did last week when he tweeted unfounded speculation about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough's connection to the "unsolved mystery" of an intern's death. The president's tweets criticizing CNN, The Times, NBC News, and other media organizations may be comical and strange, but they cause serious harm. Last week, a Libyan broadcaster quoted one of Trump's tweets on CNN in an attempt to discredit a report by the network on the persistence of slavery in that country. And, when the leader of a nation previously devoted to enacting press freedom around the world so colorfully seeks to delegitimize journalism, he inevitably gives cover to foreign despots who threaten journalists to protect their own power. At home, the Trump effect is more subtle, but corrosive. The First Amendment does not appear to be in existential danger; on the Supreme Court, justices appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents uphold expansive ideas about free speech, even as they debate interpretations of it. Yet many of the rights that working journalists enjoy stem from state laws and case-by-case decisions of local judges. The climate Trump has helped create could undermine some of these protections, for example by pushing state legislatures to overturn shield laws that codify journalists' rights to protect confidential sources. Trump's alignment with right-wing publishers, such as Infowars and Breitbart, some of which see Fox News as the old-school communications arm of an outdated Republican establishment, reflects a broader fragmentation of the media. In the cacophony of the digital age, publishers and advertisers reward readers who are deeply engaged and don't just click on sites. Distinguished news organizations like the Times and Breitbart now think of their audiences as communities in the making, bound by common values. More openly partisan political journalism need not portend the death of fact-based, truth-seeking, impartial journalism. Yet excellent journalism typically follows a form of scientific method, prioritizing evidence, transparency and replicability of results; journalism based on an ideology can be discredited by the preemptive assumptions of professionals. Fortunately, by attacking the media, Trump has in many ways strengthened them. This year, the Times, the Washington Post, and many other professional, independent enterprises reminded the country why the Founders enshrined freedom of the press as a defense against abuses of power. Among other findings, media coverage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has made transparent the seriousness of his findings so far and curbed the president's clear desire to interfere. Last Friday, Mueller dropped his latest bombshell, a plea deal with Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, who admitted to lying to the FBI in January about his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to United States. Court documents filed with Flynn's request tell the story of how senior members of Trump's transition team asked Flynn to communicate with Russian officials on U.S. foreign policy matters. The documents also contain a reference to a discussion Flynn had with "a very senior member" of the transition team, a characterization that suggests the list of names of who he might be is short. The chances that history will remember Mueller's investigation of Trump and his closest advisers as fake news are diminishingfrom day to day. Fake news has been problematic in the Philippines, where social media has disproportionate political influence. Following the 2016 Philippine elections, Senator Francis Pangilinan called for an investigation into the conduct of social media platforms that allowed the spread of fake news. Pangilinan called for sanctions on social media platforms that provided the public with false information about his ideas. The news that came out was aimed at discrediting the opposing party and used social media as a tool to bring propaganda into the mainstream media. According to media analysts, developing countries like the Philippines, with new access to social media and democracy, feel the problem of fake news to a greater extent. Facebook is one of the largest platforms being an open website, which works as a stimulus to influence public opinion through invented stories. While Facebook provides free media sources, it does not provide its users with access to fact-checking websites. For this reason, government authorities require a tool that can filter out “fake news” to ensure the integrity of cyberspace in the Philippines. Rappler, a social news network in the Philippines, investigated the online networks of Duterte supporters and found that they include fake news, fake accounts, bots and trolls, which Rappler says are used to silence dissent. The creation of fake news and fake news accounts on social media has posed a danger to the political health of the country. According to Kate Lamble and Megha Mohan of BBC News, "What we see again on social media is an artificial reality... It also creates a real chilling effect against ordinary people, against journalists (who) are prime targets, and they attack in very personal ways with death threats and rape threats." Journalists often risk their lives publishing articles challenging fake news in the Philippines. Donald Trump during a meeting Monday at the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters President Donald Trump vented his frustration with the press and courts in a series of tweets Tuesday morning in which he accused both institutions of deliberately undermining his agenda. The tweets reflected the president's well-known views on the media and the federal justice system, each a repeated target of his online attacks. At 6:35 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Trump accused the news media of publishing intentionally inaccurate stories about him and his administration in service of a "hate agenda." The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty. Deliberately incorrect stories and bogus sources to suit their hateful agenda. Sad! — Donald J. Trump, June 13, 2017 While he cited no specific articles or evidence of falsehoods, he followed up an hour later with an attack on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Monday became the second-largest court of federal appeal to rule against his administration's blocked executive order seeking to restrict travel to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries. The court based its decision in part on a tweet Trump posted on June 5 in which he argued that the United States needed a “travel ban” against certain “dangerous countries” to protect national security. The appeals court ruled that the ban unlawfully discriminated against people based on their nationality and that the government had not shown that these people would harm U.S. interests. On Tuesday, Trump said the court's decision was expected and ended his tweet on the subject with "SC," presumably an abbreviation for Supreme Court. 13, 2017