Once upon a time — it was November 2015 — “fake news” had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope’s endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election.

Since then, conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don’t like. At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted on Monday that “any negative polls are fake news.”