![]() Perhaps the most notorious use of the equivalent term, " Lügenpresse" or "lying press," was invoked by the Nazis in the 1930s and revived by far-right anti-immigration activists in Germany in 2014 and by Trump supporters during the 2016 campaign to undermine public confidence in the mainstream media. Politicians and their supporters accuse those in the mainstream media of peddling "fake news," a term President Donald Trump claimed, in an October 2017 interview with Trinity Broadcasting Network, he invented. There were no easy answers to these questions then, and 25 years later, we confront them again, not only in Europe, but in the United States and around the world. But as Pontius Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Who decides what is true? And who should compel the press to "tell the truth"? "Fake News": Trump Didn't Invent the Term If you had lived in a society where all media were controlled by the Ceaușescu dictatorship and published only authorized propaganda, much of it false, it made sense to think that the opposite should prevail in the newly independent Romania. ![]() It struck me then that the question was naïve, if understandable. During one of the presentations, a trade union representative stood up and asked, "How do we make the press tell the truth?" As part of that effort, in 1993, I traveled to Bucharest, Romania, to speak at a conference for nongovernmental organizations and other civil society groups. ![]() After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe began revising their constitutions and statutory laws to guarantee the rights of a free press. ![]()
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