There was a notable event this week in the American mainstream-media landscape. Rachel Maddow, the grande dame of the vote-blue-no-matter-who crowd, said something insightful for once. She tweeted out a clip of herself speaking to fellow MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes on his podcast a few weeks ago. In it, she cogently described why definitions matter and what happens when words lose their meaning. She noted how, in the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump turned the tables on his journalist opponents by appropriating the phrase ‘fake news’ to describe their reporting. As Maddow explained…
