Fake news isn't a new concept - Hitler called it 'lügenpresse'

A number of reputable media organisations, most notably CNN and The New York Times, are caught in Donald Trump’s web of ‘fake news’.

The US president appears to have made it his quest to expose and vilify the media, in a campaign that came to a head when he refused to take a question from a CNN reporter because he deemed the publication to be ‘fake news’.

In a news conference on Thursday, the president spent over an hour lambasting the media. He spoke about the resignation of his national security adviser Michael Flynn, and criticised the intelligence community for leaking information to the press:

I have never seen more dishonest media, frankly than the political media. The leaks are real. The leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.

In fact, he went so far as to call the media an “enemy of the American public” in the scathing, divisive conference.

The American president’s tactics and previous comments he made about immigrants have been likened to that of Adolf Hitler: Holocaust survivors compared Donald Trump’s attempt to ban immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries to the plight of the Jewish people in the 1930s.

Now, the president is once more being compared to the former German leader for his fixation on the concept of 'fake news'.

Hitler called it 'lügenpresse'

The phrase means ‘lying press’ in German, and was used to attack media outlets that were deemed to be unsupportive of the Nazi party and its aims.

It was Germany’s ‘non–word of the year’ in 2015, after the term experienced resurgence amongst anti-immigrant protesters.

Nina Janich, a professor at the Technical University Darmstadt, and head of the jury that selects the winning terms, said the “word is contaminated by the Nazis’.

The word has also been previously used by Donald Trump supporters, and in a rally in October, two people were caught saying the Nazi term to journalists:

As the old saying goes, "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it".

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