Fake news comes from all sorts of sources. It’s often characterised as originating with rogue operators, unscrupulous websites cadging a living from Google AdWords or YouTube plays. But it’s not always from them, sometimes it’s from government agencies or political leaders who we are told to trust. Of course, politicians telling lies, governments misleading is in no way a new thing. We used to call it propaganda, which suggested bias but was often outright lying. The Nazis were expert at it, but the ‘good guys’ often used it too.

Today we would call Baghdad cabbie Rafid Ahmad Alwan’s assertion that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs as ‘fake news’. It was a charge that in 2003 the US and Britain used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Both governments had been told he was a congenital liar and his claims didn’t stack up, but they ran with the story anyway because it neatly fit their agenda.

This week we were treated to the unedifying claim Donald Trump watched Russian prostitutes urinate on each other in a Moscow hotel room. We were also told Russia was blackmailing the president-elect with a dossier of dirt – essentially making him some type of Manchurian candidate.

The entirely unsubstantiated information was compiled by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who runs a security company in London called Orbis Business Intelligence, for a political opponent of Trump’s.

The fact a US security agency may have leaked the information on the eve of Trump’s inauguration says a lot about the incumbent government’s desire to influence or derail the incoming government’s relationship with Russia.

Russia incidentally has been portrayed for the past four years as some kind of rogue, expansionist state, rather than one reacting to provocations from outside its borders.

Buzzfeed, which was handed the leaked info, did what pretty much any media company would do and ran it, saying the public could make up its own mind. Of course saying that whilst presenting no balancing information creates a dangerous environment for a large section of the population to believe it.

When information is presented with the caveat ‘make up your own mind’ it invites multiple interpretations. There’s also the distinct danger the reader will form an opinion based on what they might already think of the people involved, i.e. Trump is a gauche, chauvinist, therefore the allegations are believable.

But this is where governments and other agencies have always cleverly used the media to give fake news an air of credence.

We in the media, generally speaking, are better at repeating information than analysing it. Most media organisations lack the critical facility to scrutinise the motives behind leaked information, so happy are they just for the opportunity to set the agenda and break a big story.

The other insidious thing the release of the dodgy dossier on Trump did was to allow the media to validate the claim Russia was involved in hacking the Democrats and influencing the result of the presidential election.

The Democrats, still smarting at their loss, would love everyone to believe this was true. That their loss was the result of a conspiracy and that Trump is actually an illegitimate leader.

Trump had steadfastly denied Russian involvement, as had Russia, as had Wikileaks – which in October released thousands of the emails.

In terms of fake news we’ve seen this snowball effect before, in Libya and in the build-up to the second Iraq war, where one unproven claim gives way to another, to the point where there is a concession that some of it must be true. Where there’s smoke there’s fire – not always.

And so some of the media glibly reported Trump had accepted Russian involvement in the hacking of Clinton-aide John Podesta’s emails.

Trump, clearly feeling the pressure of attacks that had turned personal, said: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I also think we’ve been hacked by other countries, other people.” He then backtracked adding “you know what, could have been others also”.

The key allegation against Russia presented in the report by America’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is the hack of the Democratic National Committee used identical methods to a previous alleged hack by Russia.

However, many hackers download pre-programmed scripts available on any exploit database and anyone using them would display the same features. A hacker in the US using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) located in Russia and accessible by anyone on the internet can appear to be staging the hack from Russia, despite being in the US.

Activist Alex Poucher, a professional hacker, claimed from his own detailed analysis of the ODNI report it was not possible to tell where the hack had originated or who was behind it.

He said: “At the end of the day, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence is all this report is, without any proof to back up any of the claims whatsoever, except hearsay.

“I have personally [gone] over every aspect of the attack and what I can tell you, what I have found is that every aspect of the attack, the entry or the payload, is not particularly sophisticated. A 14-year-old script kiddy with download capabilities could have pulled off this hack.”

What we are left with are a lot of untestable allegations (hot air), all designed to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency.

All you can do is ask: Who benefits?