Our American media has churned out yet another round of fake news this week. Two recent stories illustrate our media's sad and maddening descent to the level of supermarket tabloids.
The first was the feeding frenzy among cable news talking heads sparked by a BuzzFeed story claiming that there was incontrovertible evidence that President-elect Donald Trump ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his real estate projects in Russia.
Media commentators on almost every network were giddy with excitement over Mr. Trump's manifest subornation of perjury and his inevitable impeachment. Until, that is, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued a denial that any such evidence was in hand. With that, crestfallen news reporters began their by now regular and reluctant walkback of their earlier stories.
Even so, the damage had been done and large portions of the population, including even Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand, remained convinced that the story was true despite Mueller's disclaimer.
Then came the orgy of media outrage arising from the completely phony revelation of a bunch of teenagers from Covington Catholic High School harassing a native-American demonstrator during a protest in Washington, D.C. The students, who had been participating in the March for Life (which you probably didn't even know occurred if you only get your news from mainstream sources), were waiting for their bus when they were approached by a group from an organization called Black Hebrew Israelites who began hurling racist, homophobic slurs and taunts at them.
Because the media falsely made the students out to be the aggressors in this incident they and their families are being threatened, their school has been vilified, social media nitwits are doing everything they can to ruin these kids' lives, and the whole thing was a lie amplified by a media with a ravenous appetite for scandal involving anyone who can be tied to President Trump (some of the students were wearing MAGA hats).
One gentle soul who works for something called Vulture declared that “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.” The students, this beacon of comity averred, were “white slugs.”
Well, they were also the innocent party in this sordid episode, and the secular puritans, both left and right, who were so quick to condemn them have behaved at best irresponsibly and at worst reprehensibly. And, of course, the walkback has begun.
For a full account of what actually happened go here. For a description of the execrable behavior exhibited by the boys' critics see this article at PJ Media.
There was a time when journalists occasionally cared about the effect their reporting might have on the lives of the people they reported on. There was a time when journalists demanded that a story be independently corroborated before they'd publish it.
Today that standard has been abandoned and replaced with one which allows for the public airing of almost anything that reflects poorly on the president or his supporters, and any innocent bystanders who suffer are just written off as collateral damage.
Retractions can always come later, if need be, after public perception of the president has been ratcheted down a few more notches and public hatred for him and his voters boosted a few degrees higher.
Not all journalists have the ethics of a mob hit man, of course. Some of them are still old-fashioned enough to believe they have a professional responsibility to make sure their reports are true before they put them before the public, but it's hard today to find any of those dinosaurs on CNN or MSNBC.
Little wonder so many Americans agree with President Trump when he accuses the media of persistently trading in "fake news."