I don't want to be overly cynical and say it was intentional, but the term was watered down to become meaningless, but when it first came into use, it had a pretty clear and unambiguous meaning that I don't think any reasonable person would argue with. The Washington Post published an expose early in 2016 about two men in Orange County who had the brilliant idea of exploiting pre-election hysteria by registering hundreds of domains with names like patriotdailynews.com, giving it all the veneer of a real news page, writer bylines and bios, but all of it was completely made up. It was just the two guys in their apartment living room brainstorming the most outrageous sounding headlines they could come up that they thought people might believe, then making up fake writers and fake sources. That is "fake news."
When it started being used to mean any published account of purported facts that is wrong because inference is imperfect, evidence can be misleading, and publishers have some inescapable level of bias, then yes, it became a useless term. But it is not useless to distinguish between largely good faith attempts by real organizations with investigators who are at least trying to discover, verify, and publish facts, but some of the time fail, and outright fraud committed by people making up the entire endeavor wholesale.
There is no reason at all we should believe authorities cannot accomplish the latter.
A democracy with the government in control of speech is not a democracy. If you control what people can see, you control what they think. That's why it's the very first most important amendment. Without the free distribution of information we're all useless idiots to the people in control of the distribution. We've already seen censorship be used to sway elections, do you think that's OK?
When it started being used to mean any published account of purported facts that is wrong because inference is imperfect, evidence can be misleading, and publishers have some inescapable level of bias, then yes, it became a useless term. But it is not useless to distinguish between largely good faith attempts by real organizations with investigators who are at least trying to discover, verify, and publish facts, but some of the time fail, and outright fraud committed by people making up the entire endeavor wholesale.
There is no reason at all we should believe authorities cannot accomplish the latter.