Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Fake news — it’s a real thing.

On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”
Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts.
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In particular, the Post did not respond when I asked how headlines are fact checked and if headline writers conduct any form of fact checking to ensure their summarized version is consistent with known facts. The Post also did not respond to a request for comment on why it took nearly half a day from the time the article was rewritten until an editorial note was finally appended acknowledging that the conclusions of the original article were false and that the article had been substantively rewritten to support a different conclusion, nor did the Post comment on why the editor’s note was originally placed at the bottom of the article and only moved after I inquired about its location. Yet, perhaps most intriguing is that, as with the Santa Claus story, the Post did not respond to repeated requests for comment regarding how it conducts fact checking for its stories. This marks twice in a row that the Post has chosen not to respond in any fashion to my requests for more detail on its fact checking processes.

Related! CNN uses screenshot from ‘Fallout 4’ to show how Russians hack things