If it is true that some personalities invite sobriquets, then it has to be admitted that lo! Donald Trump's name leads all the rest. Right now, after his announcement of the Fake News Awards list, he might perhaps be greeted suitably as the Master of the Bizarre. Few would deny that this is a fitting achievement on the eve of completing one year of a turbulently loquacious presidency. The American president has done something quite unprecedented. The leader of the world's largest democracy has whipped away, or attempted to whip away, the carpet from below the feet of the nation's free media by naming them, in order of 'merit', for fake news. Not only are the named media organizations some of the most respected in the country, but the items chosen for notice are also mostly those which have been acknowledged as mistaken and apologized for. Like a sulky little bully-boy, Mr Trump has struck at his nation's news outfits for "negative" reporting about him.

This entire spectacle would have been outrageously funny had not the exercise contained multiple dangers. As senators from Mr Trump's own party have pointed out, destroying the credibility of the media would encourage repressive regimes to follow suit, thus muzzling reporters and misleading the public. His whim would raise questions about the image of the United States of America as the defender of human rights, and a president who reacts in this way because he cannot take criticism is treading a "dangerous" path. As ominous is the fact that Mr Trump called the media the enemy of the American people, echoing, strangely enough, Josef Stalin.

The black joke gets blacker with the awareness that Mr Trump is supposed to have made numerous misleading statements in 355 days in office. The term, 'fake news' gained currency, with appropriate irony, as suspicions of Moscow's involvement in Mr Trump's triumph began to surface - a murky chapter that has grown murkier in spite of Mr Trump's vehemence. Mr Trump cannot resist a lie, which his men scramble to turn into truth. He insists that Barack Obama's actions created the Islamic State with a blithe disregard of dates, that the US is the most highly taxed nation in the world, which is nonsense, that global warming is a myth made for and by China and that the recent cold wave proves it - and so on it goes. Apparently newspapers constantly under-represented the crowds at his inauguration - he falsely claimed them to be the biggest ever - and then apologized to their "dwindling" subscribers, something they never did. The list threatens to be endless. By deliberately upending the media's credibility in order to establish his own fictitious reality, Mr Trump has done away with the need for accountability and transparency. His doctor seems to follow in his footsteps, claiming, against all obvious signs, that Mr Trump is in "excellent" physical health. Good for him. He has fake news to play with.