Again, consider the fundamental difference between slanted news and fake news. Slanted news presents things that actually happened. If you read enough news with different slants, you will end up with a pretty good picture of what happened as you will have all the facts.
Consider a sound bite where Trump says, "You know, a lot of people say I hate black people, but that's not true."
Extremely slanted news could grab just the "I hate black people" part and wildly change the meaning of his words. But it doesn't change.the fact that he said those words. That means if you read news of a different slant, you will get the full context and understand what actually happened.
But consider fake news. They could make up something completely, like say, "Trump displays Nazi Flag next to American Flag at recent rally." This simply isn't true. But you won't find any context about it anywhere else because, since it didn't happen, nobody is reporting anything about it. So you either believe the story in it's entirety, or you reject it completely.
Now here's where the problem comes in: if you call slanted news "fake news", you are asking people to categorically reject that news source, thus taking a valuable source of context off the table. That leaves only the news that is slanted the way he wants, which denies people the ability to gain full context into his actions.
Even worse, people get in the habit of rejecting news they don't like as "fake", which means that they are essentially choosing the reality they want to live in rather than attempting to understand the world as it actually is.
This is how we find ourselves in a world where we have an "emergency at the southern border" when illegal border crossings are at near record lows. Then, when you show people the statistics, they simply decide not to believe it. Productive debate and problem solving is impossible if you can't even agree about what is actually happening.
So slanted news is bad. If it is so slanted that it intentionally alters the meaning of quotes and events, it is not a reliable news source. But perfectly objective news is impossible to make. Even a good faith effort to produce a balanced and complete accounting of events will omit some details some people will find important. This is why you must get your news from at least three news sources, one of which is slanted in a way you don't like.
But no matter how bad slanted news is, it will never do the damage of fake news. That is why we must recognize the difference and keep it in our minds when form opinions based on what we read.
The consequences are real. The damage is real. Fake news is dangerous, and so is Trump's desire to label any news he doesn't like as "fake". CNN is not the paragon of journalistic virtue, but you can watch it and gain context into things that actually happened. Nothing they report is fake, even if it is often slanted.
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