Let's be clear about who drained the meaning from the phrase "fake news"

A new take on “fake news” had been bubbling for a while, and now it has the imprimatur of a Washington Post columnist. Here’s Margaret Sullivan:

Fake news has a real meaning—deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost.

So far, so good. The phrase “fake news” has been getting plastered willy-nilly on anything that’s false, and sometimes just on something that someone wants to suggest is false. I’ve been complaining about that for more than a month.

But then the column start to go off track:

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

Wait. The conservative media machine? Did you think they came up with this?