The WaPo Gets B*tch Slapped**

Much like the New York Times, the Washington Post was once considered a respectable newspaper. Forbes does a good job of outlying why that will never be the case again:

How The Washington Post's Defense Of Its Russian Hacking Story Unraveled Through Web Archiving

As the Washington Post’s story of Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch unraveled into the story of a single non-grid-connected laptop with a piece of malware on it, the Post has faced fierce criticism over how it fact checked and verified the details of its story. It turns out that the Post not only did not fact check the story until after it was published live on its website, but in its defense of the story, the Post made a number of false statements about what was written when, which the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reveals.

Needless to say the WaPo lied about trying to corroborate the story:

When I asked the Post why it had not contacted the utilities prior to publication, in her emailed response to me, [Kris] Coratti [Vice President of Communications and Events for the Washington Post] asserted that the Post had indeed contacted both utilities for comment prior to publication and had not received a reply from either and so proceeded with publication... I reached out to Mike Kanarick, Director of Customer Care, Community Engagement and Communications for Burlington Electric Department for comment…  It turns out that the reason that Burlington Electric did not response to the Post’s prepublication request for comment is that the Post actually did not reach out for comment until after it had already run its story.

Performed no external fact cheeking:

...the Post ran its story based solely and exclusively on the word of US Government sources that it placed absolute trust in. That the Post would run an entire story based exclusively on the word of its US Government sources and without any other external fact checking (such as contacting the two utilities), offers a fascinating glimpse into just how much blind trust American newspapers place in Government sources, to repeat their claims verbatim without the slightest bit of vetting or confirmation.

Secretly substantively re-wrote the article:

...the Post’s idea of fact checking is to publish first and then correct the story by rewriting it bit by bit in the hours following publication, rather than collecting all facts and developing a definitive hard story before ever allowing it to be published... [This] is what leads to false and misleading news circulating, especially as other news outlets picked up on the Post’s story and ran it assuming that the Post had conducted all of the necessary fact checking.

And then only fessed up to having re-written the article many hours after it had been called out:

Ms. Coratti also did not respond to a request for comment on why the Post took more than 11 hours to post an editor’s note notifying readers that the article had been substantively rewritten and the original thesis retracted.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that mainstream journalists have become obsessed with the crusade against #fakenews, all while enabling and fueling this dissemination of it and failing to take responsibility. You can read the whole take down here,

** My apologies for the derogatory headline. Like WaPo, I can't be held responsible for the content of my blog