The term is also woefully inadequate for describing the complexity of the situation. When we think about the Facebook posts created by Russian accounts during the US election, would we consider them news? What about the image of a shark swimming up a Texas highway during Hurricane Harvey? That shark was real, but it was not in Houston during that hurricane.

We live in a time when our information streams are polluted and there are many different types of information. They move and shift. Some types are visible; others are harder to spot. Some we would all agree are problematic — manipulated images created during a breaking news event, for example, designed to confuse and to hoax. But what about satirical news websites? What about misleading headlines designed solely to drive traffic?

We need to rethink our vocabulary.