Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the media has worked itself into a panic about the rise of fake news on social media. Reporters have examined the subject from dozens of angles -- profiling misinformation peddlers from California to the Caucasus, analyzing how hoaxes spread, raising red flags about media literacy, and much more.

You can understand why journalists are so worried. For one thing, most reporters genuinely want the public to be well-informed. For another, there’s a matter of self-interest: Fake news undermines journalists’ authority as arbiters of truth. Also -- and I’ll let you in on a little secret here -- most mainstream journalists probably preferred Clinton to Trump, so the idea that fake news swung the election is a tantalizing story.