There is also a serious question about who exactly tipped off national newspapers to the presence of the phony bot accounts tied to Moore. There’s more than one query of the following type in the Twitter Files …

For obvious reasons none of the reporters I contacted were interested in talking about the origin stories behind these queries, so the angle remains unresolved.

News organizations appeared to wait just long enough to give Warner and Burr their headlines before blowing up New Knowledge as fake-news creators. One could additionally gripe about the way the news of an effort to sabotage a Senate election was reported — the Washington Post ran a headline, “Secret campaign to use Russian-inspired tactics in 2017 Ala. election stirs anxiety for Democrats” — but the major problem was the failure to take the obvious next step suggested by the Alabama revelations, and look into other work by New Knowledge. Had they done so, they might have found out about Hamilton 68 before the Twitter Files came out, and would have taken a long second look at the oft-quoted Senate report, which as Twitter officials noted, used the same “deem-stuff-IRA-created-and-spin-up-hype” technique they’d seen before.

[This is Matt’s follow-up to the earlier article I linked, this time with more emphasis on the media’s role in promoting witch hunts based on cooked data. He raises some good questions about their ethics in these stories, as well as broader questions about their credibility in other areas. — Ed]