Many Americans think “fake news” is a term Donald Trump invented, but it goes back a long way.

Journalists have manipulated information to advance a political agenda since our nation’s founding. But for some reason, Americans placed an inordinate amount of trust in their TV news giants beginning in the mid-20th century. Names like Cronkite, Huntley, and Brinkley come to mind.

Then again, before the Internet, there was nowhere else to turn. The voices and images coming into our living rooms seemed perfectly believable because there were no alternative viewpoints. That all changed, though, when the “Father of Fake News,” CBS News anchor Dan Rather, took a lie too far and broke the trust that Americans had long placed in their news sources.

Rather could have found his place among that same group of TV news deans until he put all semblance of objectivity aside and resorted to flat-out lies on national TV in a calculated and utterly false pre-election smear of then-President George W. Bush regarding his Vietnam-era military service in the Texas Air National Guard. Thanks to the dogged investigative work and truth-telling of a handful of bloggers and online sleuths, Rather’s career effectively came to an unceremonious end, and for many Americans, the Rather scandal was the turning point during which they decided never to trust the big network news organizations again.

Of course, Rather wasn’t the only one.

Nearly 20 years ago, a memo from ABC News political director Mark Halperin admonishing the network’s staff not to report the distortions of presidential candidates John Kerry and George W. Bush equally, claiming that “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”

Nothing’s changed. Media outlets make the same argument when confronted about why they don’t cover Biden’s mistakes as much as Trump’s. If you’re a Democrat, the media claim, everything you do is with good intentions and without interest in gaining power.

And yet today, that same Dan Rather is calling for fact-checking of information and condemning biased journalism. Yes, 92-year-old Dan Rather is still around. Who knew?

Rather wrote on the social media platform X: “When one side lies intentionally and repeatedly, they are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt. They should be held to account, right away. Do not simply repeat the narratives they spew.”

Rather’s blather is meant as an attack on alternative or conservative media, but it really applies to the Leftmedia as a whole, which is complicit in circling the wagons around a narrative and pushing lies as the God’s-honest-truth. Especially when it comes to anything related to Donald Trump. As his post claims: “Rigorous and robust fact-checking is the best defense against misinformation, intentional lies, and deflection. If Trump says the sky is green, the story isn’t that the sky is now green; the story is that the sky is still blue and Trump got it wrong.”

Wait a minute, Dan. When’s the last time the media reported anything Trump said without twisting it to fit their agenda? The suggestion that the media is Trump’s lapdog is preposterous. All “journalists” have done since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 is fact-check The Donald — and their fact-checking is grossly biased. Back in 2016, for instance, The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg suggested that journalists couldn’t possibly cover Hillary Clinton’s campaign in a rigorous or honest way because Trump was too dangerous. Rutenberg said that when it came to Trump, his colleagues needed to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.”

Clearly, the person running Dan Rather’s X account doesn’t know who Rather is or how he tarnished the media’s credibility by pushing fake news. The point here is that the media created this problem. Americans don’t trust the media because of decades of lies and half-truths. Now, they’re pushing this notion that truth and objectivity should be the goal of reporting? Where have these standards been in the past 20 or 30 years?

It’s a great idea, though. Imagine how different this country would look had the media really tried to be objective in recent decades. Politically, the country would be more like 60-40 Republican. Either that or Democrats would be far more moderate and not so far off the left cliff.

Now, with plenty of alternative sources of information on the Internet, the bigwigs and beat reporters of the Leftmedia can’t sleep at night, so they resort to calling everything they don’t like a lie in the name of objectivity.

But it’s not working. In fact, Americans can see right through it. As our own Emmy Griffin wrote last year, a majority of Americans now believe the mainstream media is a threat to democracy. As a result, Leftmedia news outlets are cutting staff like never before.

The media have long been exposed for their lies and hypocrisy, forcing left-wing journalists to move even further to the fringes and thus making their bias even more obvious to everyone.

Thank you, Dan Rather.