Nick O'Malley is a senior writer and a former US correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
There is a lot of false rhetoric being tossed around today about fake news, which is a pity because though it is new, fake news is an important term that means something specific, a term worth resuscitating if it is not already dead.
"A dead man can't leak stuff," Bob Beckel once huffed of Julian Assange on a Fox News panel. "This guy's a traitor, he's treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I'm not for the death penalty, so...there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
If it really is true that people start the year as they intend to go on, there are some solid indications from Canberra that we are in for a long year full of small ideas.
Any faint hope held by Donald Trump's doubters in the US that he might prove to be more considered in power than he was on the campaign has been quashed by his bromance with Vladimir Putin.
In October, when Donald Trump's White House bid looked to have been derailed by the release of the ugly "pussy-gate" tape recording, Trump sought to reset his campaign with policy-heavy speech made on sacred American soil, the battlefield at Gettysburg.
It was hard not to be distracted by Donald Trump's performance in the first presidential debate, and indeed the focus lay with him in much of the subsequent analysis.
Over 40,000 Americans are dying each year partly because they live in a society in which it is more politically viable to propose banning Muslims than regulate gun sales.
If Bernie Sanders hopes to be remembered as a positive force in American politics, he must now end his campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination.
There are two competing theories afoot in America at the moment about how the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died.
Despite being a fake news anchor, The Daily Show satirist Jon Stewart was once considered the fourth most trusted new anchor in the United States.
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