The Welcome to Media Roots Radio. This is your host, Abby Martin.

This is Robbie Martin. Welcome to our podcast, everybody.

Today I'm excited to introduce a guest I've been wanting to have on for quite a while

to discuss the dysfunction of our media landscape, the propaganda sphere and how the concept of fake news has always been a feature, not a bug, of capitalism and empire.

Nolan Higden is a member of Project Censored, a teacher of history and media studies, and the author of two books, The Anatomy of Fake News,

a Critical News Education, and United States of Distraction, Media Manipulation, and Post-Truth America.

You co-authored that book with Mickey Huff, the current director of Project Censored.

Last year, I was honored to edit and narrate a documentary produced by Project Censored and based on Nolan's books called United States of Distraction, Fighting the Fake News Invasion, which everyone can watch for free on Project Censored's YouTube channel, which I'll link to in the SoundCloud description below.

Nolan, thank you so much for joining us on Media Roots Radio.

Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.

So, Nolan, people may associate the term fake news with Donald Trump. Of course, he popularized

this term during his presidency. And as you mentioned in your book, right out of the gate,

pretty much, which I thought was interesting. In 2017, the Merriam-Webster

Dictionary argued that it, quote, sees no need to even consider it for an entry in the dictionary

as a separate term because it is, quote, self-explanatory and straightforward. But Nolan,

given its long complex history and exploitation by state and corporate actors, isn't it really

difficult to define? Yeah, this was one of the major frustrations about writing this book.

I had this idea about a decade ago to kind of chronicle the history of false information

presented as news. And I couldn't get anyone to go along with sort of letting me write it

as a dissertation or a book because they didn't know exactly what I was talking about.

So at some level, I was kind of excited that Donald Trump reintroduced the term.

But I was quickly, you know, pretty pessimistic to say the least because everyone started to sort of argue that fake news was something that only the Russians did or only Trump did or only right-wing trolls did, which is true at some level these folks do engage in fake news.

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