The Point About Fake News,

and rumours about this or that party leader,
is never just that the story is fake in itself.

The point is that the story generates
further rumour and doubt
like a fire that, once lit, never goes out.

The oldest fake news that most people
half-know about is 'The protocol of the elders of Zion'
a patchwork of documents put together by anti-Semites
circa 1900 to suggest that the Jews, a people then without a land,
had a plan for taking over all of the world.
In the twenty first century it is easy to find.
Look online....

In the UK in the 1924 'The Zinoviev letter'
was used by White Russians against the Bolsheviks
and by the mistrustful British Secret Services
against the first elected Labour government.
It was a lie, but it was a lie that stuck
because of mounting fears around failing diplomacy. 

In the present day business confidentiality
and money that travels with ease and gets itself laundered
is what fuels present day rumours of which politician
is secretly tied to which government well outside
the country in which they are standing for office.

Who wrote the lie? And who did they write it for?
Which of the politicians enemies-at home or abroad?
should be the points that should be answered in a properly working free press. 

But by the time the story is that clear
neither the politician nor their enemies,
or the popular press, want to hear any more
of what was never even slightly true in the first place.