This week, Donald Trump will elevate his war on mainstream journalism by hosting his inaugural “Fake News Awards” — an imagined ceremony where gongs will be handed out to those reporters and outlets the President considers the “most corrupt and biased of the mainstream media”.

If this farce goes ahead, being recognised on such a platform will undoubtedly become an ironic accolade for some of America’s best journalists, those for whom holding a demagogue accountable and pursuing truth in a post-truth age is an important part of their work.

This worrisome ‘fake news’ narrative has become the divert and deflect tactic of the leader of the free world, but the Trumpist bloc isn’t the only one to see news media as the source of their problems.

Of late, a stubborn chasm has been opened and there exists a virulent antagonism towards traditional journalism from emergent populist groups, believing that their principles and ideologies are underrepresented in broadcast and print.

As with most things nowadays, if you mute the noise, you’ll find that there probably was a legitimate concern which then catalysed a wider, oft-conspiratorial and logic-deprived narrative.

In the case of the fake news advocates, the original catalyst would be the actual fake political news phenomenon: entirely fabricated and untruthful articles - not from professional news outlets but often from nameless faceless entities online - which were published with the intention of reaching viral status, generating website clicks and facilitating an income stream.

Let's be clear what fake news is: phoney clickbait articles full of lies and unverified claims are fake - because they aren’t true. It's as simple as that. By contrast, a piece of sourced political reporting from a credible news outlet isn’t fake simply because it has a certain slant that doesn’t align with our own view on things.

‘Fake news’, or 'biased MSM' or 'SNP bad' is no longer describing something accurately - each buzzword is issued as a method of diverting attention from political critique and fuels the flames of omnipresent conspiracy.

All Western governments will tell you that they receive unfair coverage in the press, and that’s because it’s the free media’s responsibility to scrutinise and hold to account. A government can distribute it’s line and it will be heard, but a reporter will approach it more cynically and rightfully so.

In the Scottish context, however, it just so happens that the party of government is tied to a wider movement - one which feels underrepresented and can’t disconnect itself from how party politics is reported.

I spoke to a friend of mine ahead of writing this piece, who - like myself - voted Yes and is very pro-independence. They told me what it was like to work at BBC Scotland during the heyday of anti-bias protests, when they would leave their work through the main entrance and get called a ‘scumbag’.

That’s a good example of when a legitimate criticism of angles and slant spirals into something fallacious and uncontrollable. Where bias is seen everywhere but nuance nowhere. Feeling like the underdog often encourages behaviours and world-views that are skewed in themselves, whereby every institution is suddenly working against you.

We’re living in a polarised society, and people will always find an ulterior motive if they go hunting for it. They’ll perceive critical reportage as indicative of a wider conspiracy, whereby an entire, diverse and pluralised industry has a hidden agenda to misrepresent their own world-view. They never see themselves reflected, even when they often are. It’s classic confirmation bias.

Granted, much of this plays out online. Last week saw a flurry of refreshed criticisms after the so-called ‘Christmas Box scandal’. For anyone who doesn’t use social media, the Christmas Box row centres on the fact that all parties issue a series of embargoed press-releases to keep themselves connected to the public, via the press, over the festive period.

Scottish Labour’s was published within the pro-indy blogosphere, and this led to claims that the party is “running the mainstream media” from some Twitter commentators. The entire debacle was disingenuous at best.

Press-releases are standard practice, it’s not just political parties who issue them but charities, campaigns, businesses, think-tanks, publicists. It’s the flow of information, and in most cases they’re used for soft news as opposed to investigative reporting.

The reason they’re usually issued with an embargo is to give a journalist the time to build their story. Any journalist will spot partisanship and construct a wider narrative around the information in the release. This is why you’ll see balanced counter quotes in the published piece. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s operational media.

Suggestions that press-releases are evidence of an institutional plot comes back to our fundamental point: that if you’re already convinced of something, then you’re always going to miss the nuance.

Factionalism obviously exists in media outlets and I’m not suggesting that isn’t the case. Still, there’s a difference between engaging critically, in the knowledge that implicit bias exists in all of us, and haranguing an entire industry and every journalist within as working to an ulterior agenda.

It’s interesting that news is only ever fake when it’s related to politics, isn’t it? That age-old terrain of disagreement and ideology. The left will tell you that a particular media outlet is against them, but the right will tell you that it has a left-wing bias. The pro-EU crowd will complain about underreporting, whilst Eurosceptics will tell you that Remainers are overrepresented. Momentum will tell you that Jeremy gets an unfair hearing, whilst Tory activists will tell you that journalists are intent on toppling the Prime Minister.

The ‘the mainstream media’ is not a homogenous, single entity. We have to separate legitimate criticisms of institutions and the balance of power, from the operations of orthodox journalism as a practice. In the pursuit of truth and accountability, we are reliant on the latter.

Snowden and Manning couldn’t have exposed state secrets without the press, we wouldn’t know about the Panama Papers and the misuse of parliamentary expenses wouldn’t have been uncovered.

Yet there is a growing culture-war on critical journalism: whether that’s from Trump’s attacks, from the 'Christmas Box' brigade, from litigation happy corporations or from powerful interest groups for whom a free and investigative media is a nuisance as opposed to a democratic asset.

That is concerning, and we have to be cautious of fuelling misplaced narratives which are then co-opted - when a President can say that all critical news is fake and be believed, or when the Scottish independence supporting newspaper you are reading is accused of pro-union bias for analytically reporting government policy or practice.

When the proposition is to trust the information coming from the blogosphere, where no regulator exists and authors are not bound by the same ethical and legal standards and regulations as accredited reporters, then that really is post-truth.

As Thomas Jefferson once said: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”.

Jordan Daly is a writer and equality and human rights campaigner