It is an inescapable phenomenon of American journalism and has been denounced as a "degenerate and twisted monster" by Raphael Pulitzer, the son of news tycoon Pulitzer. From the early days of the fake to gain attention,

to compete for the market to discredit other media, and then to the wartime control of public relations tools, today, false news has become a partisan, capital struggle weapon, so that the public's life is filled with "toxic" false news.

Mr. Trump did not invent the term "fake news," and his strategy of blaming the news media for his own mistakes was not his. He is not the first public figure to manipulate journalists and journalistic conventions for his own benefit,

the first to measure authenticity by ideological standards, or the first to exploit new technology in ways its inventors never imagined. Other political operatives have deliberately undermined citizens' trust in public institutions and news organizations,

or established symbiotic relationships with like-minded news organizations that only pretend to be independent or falsely label stories they find negative or embarrassing.

Fake news and fake reporting will always be part of the American news landscape as long as there is an American news media that has shown a disturbing capacity for innovation and adaptability to obscure its intentions and complicate and confuse the lives of citizens.

Without an explanation of the many ways in which democratic information systems have been hacked and exploited by scammers, propagandists, braggers, partisans, bluffers, scandal-makers and personally motivated fraudsters,

democratic information systems are a vital infrastructure for the lives of citizens, but they also face insecurity. Then the history of American journalism is incomplete. Journalism has always had a more tenuous relationship with truth than many of us realize.

But the more than 30,000 "false or misleading statements" this president has made publicly during his four years in office - often to please his loyal right-wing supporters - have focused and accelerated historical trends like never before.

Moreover, under Trump, decades-long decay in party relations has reached its peak; Citizens are deeply divided, with factions having little common language; People tend to demonize experts, expertise, and truth rather than seeing it as someone else's opinion.

Add to that the constant rejection of science and expertise, even in the midst of a deadly pandemic, as elitist and untrustworthy; There is widespread support for wild, apocalyptic conspiracy theories; Social media is a vast, mysterious and unaccountable institution with a seemingly limitless supply of hacks,

fakes and disinformation; The contract of mutual benefit unites the right-wing political world with the right-wing media empire. The result is toxic falsehoods on an unprecedented scale in public life,

where disinformation and misinformation are used as basic tools and "truth" is seen as something to be deserved. Anything that's supposed to be true can be true. Anything that supports one's political opponents is fake.

Journalistic historians are also haunted by this plea: Isn't there anything to be learned from the history of fake news that will help us deal with the current crisis? It makes sense for historians to look at the past as a kind of tarot card,

which can offer foreshadowing insights into the road ahead, but even that may be the wrong question - and, of course, the Trump administration's overuse of the term fake news has obscured any possible answer. Perhaps more useful is the question: What can we learn from the history of fake news and its increasingly vicious relationship with political partisans?

In the two centuries since America's first newspaper debuted in Boston and then died, newspapers have mostly played with the truth, not investigated it, and there is no clear morphological distinction between fake news and its real counterpart.

Responsible news organizations have always been willing to commit to an obligation to provide trustworthy information to the public, and responsible readers and viewers have always expected journalism to pay serious attention to serious matters.

But in the early world of free competition for newspapers, responsible newspapers needed to constantly compete with malicious, fanatical, greedy and stupid newspapers.

Since the 19th century, it has been widely known that newspapers, photo albums, cinemas of the late 19th century, and the ether realm contain a great deal of strictly non-informational content, and that readers do not expect everything they hear or read in public places to be true. They can choose for themselves what to accept as true.

Readers see the social and economic value of the information, and they can trust that the information is reliable and relevant; Journalists, on the other hand, see usefulness, prestige, and commercial advantage in claiming to be the ones telling the public the truth.

It is the dual pressure of these two stakeholders that finally allows the practice of journalism to form a certain order. When journalists are shaping their status as truth-tellers, the label of falsehood is indispensable as a foil. When journalists first started talking about "fakery" in the 1880s,

many saw it as a compliment, meant to be light and easy for readers to read. Soon, however, the professional journalistic class adopted the term as jargon, and in the process, readers no longer had the responsibility (or opportunity) to decide what public information they should believe.

Thus, when mainstream journalists began to proclaim investigative methods that ultimately came to be seen as objective as professional codes, facts as their credo, and "truth" as their special property, it was only in 1912 that the falsification of newspapers took on the flavor of what Ralph Pulitzer called "a degenerate and perverted monster."