At the end of the day, that may be the most troubling thing of all: The journalists themselves don’t seem bothered by the obvious double-standards and shoddy practices that have infected their own work and the wider information environment. They look zealously for evidence of a COVID spike after a single Donald Trump re-election rally. They shrug as New York City’s contact tracers are instructed not to ask COVID-carriers whether they’ve attended the massive “largely peaceful” protests.
We should have seen this coming. Less than two weeks after his 2016 warning that hoaxes would have higher production values from now on, Ben Smith decided to publish the unedited “Steele Dossier,” containing all sorts of sordid allegations against Donald Trump that Smith said his reporters could not confirm or disprove. The stories in the dossier were compiled by a British spook talking to Russian intelligence as part of opposition research for the Clinton campaign, and they formed the basis for treating the just-elected president as a suspected Manchurian Candidate controlled by Moscow. After a few years, an impeachment trial, and endless breathless updates on how the walls were closing in, we discovered the very thing any news-literate reader would have guessed at the time if the relevant journalistic investigations had been done: The dossier was filled with misinformation that Russian intelligence hoped to get the U.S. media to run with. The media that had warned against fake news willingly and happily propagated it.
And thus another critical democratic institution decided it would be more fun and emotionally satisfying to fail than to perform the function with which the public entrusts it.
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