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| Senator Jeff Flake |
"2017 was a year which saw the truth – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government," Flake said in a speech on the Senate floor.
"The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated," the Arizona Republican asserted.
Today, dictators are again waging war against the free press, only this time, they're using Trump's term — fake news — as a cudgel, Flake said.
Flake cited chilling examples, including Syrian President Bashar Assad's use of "fake news" to describe an Amnesty International report, and a state official in Myanmar who denied the existence of the entire Rohingya ethnic group by labeling them "fake news."
"Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language," Flake said. "We are not in a 'fake news' era, as Bashar Assad says. We are, rather, in an era in which the authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere."
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