WASHINGTON ― White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted Wednesday that while she doesn’t always like how the media covers her boss, she still has the utmost respect for the news business.
“I’m a person in the West Wing who’s actually never uttered the words ‘fake news,’ ‘enemy of the people,’ ‘opposition party,’” Conway said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. “I don’t speak that way. I think we need a full and free press in our nation, of course.”
“My grievance,” she added, “is never about fake news. I talk about incomplete coverage.”
But a quick search shows that she has, indeed, used the term “fake news,” albeit certainly less frequently than President Donald Trump.
Trump and the White House have co-opted the term “fake news” to describe unfavorable stories in an attempt to discredit the media. The term originally referred to stories during the campaign that circulated on social media and were deliberately authored to be false.
During an interview on CNN last year, Conway used the term “fake news” when discussing Trump’s unlikely victory in the November election last year.
“The biggest piece of fake news in this election was that Donald Trump couldn’t win, so there’s that. That was peddled in weeks and months before the campaign, definitely in the closing days,” she said in December. “If you go back, because we have them, and you pull the whole front page ... that’s fake because it’s based on things that just aren’t true.
During another interview with CNN this year, Conway said she didn’t think the network was ”fake news,” a label Trump has given it.
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