With decades of practice and turbocharged by cybertools and social media, Russia played us like a violin. They issued faked messages from Google to carry out phishing attacks on a variety of U.S. government and political officials. As King’s College professor Thomas Rid pointed out in congressional testimony, American journalists were often unwitting victims of Russian fake news, not the creators that Trump accuses them of being.

Moreover, Russia used automated Twitter accounts to spread false news during the campaign. In fact, a study by Oxford University claims that if questionable WikiLeaks material and Russian-origin stories are folded in, more than 45 percent of election-related news accounts amounted to propaganda.

Rather than battling the U.S. media, Trump should be pushing government agencies such as Homeland Security, the FBI, the U.S. Information Agency, the Department of State and the CIA to uncover Russian fake news and throw a spotlight on it.