My point is that this "fake news" trend is pretty ironic - since it comes from some of the most prolific propaganda outlets, that despite being caught in the act of promoting a certain agenda over truth, continues to attempt to bullshit what is left of their readership.

The pure desperation of using "fake news" as a mantra for weeks suggests that the conglomerate hold is finally dwindling away in the american media sphere.

That all media is bullshit and the whole fake news fiasco is hypocritical. No one fact checks or does real investigative journalism. WaPo might as well call themselves into wars or whatever that crap is called. At least the latter, delusional as they might be, believe they make world better place instead knowingly working for the great propaganda machine.

Obviously false. There is an explosion of fact checkers and still plenty of investigative journalism teams.

If you mean 'not every story is fully fact-checked and the product of investigative journalism', then sure. But then, they never have been. That's the nature of a news industry that tries to fill a paper by print time every day (or, in modern terms, to get their stories out a minute before the competition online).

Then those "fact checkers" and "investigative journalism teams" obviously aren't doing much good, if they weren't deployed for what was obviously going to be an explosive article. If the fact checkers couldn't be deployed for this story, they obviously are stretched to near-nonexistence.

I really don't envy you right now, trying so vigorously to defend something that has long since become so obviously indefensible. Sure, it could be the case that the media is really, really careful all the time, exercising their nigh-superhuman judgment with fairness and care, but this one story just happened to slip through. But it is a far more parsimonious explanation that the story flattered their biases and they shipped it without so much as a tenth of the examination they'd give a story that doesn't favor flatter their biases. The "this was an exception to their otherwise phenomenal care!" excuse wears quite thin when you have to deploy it several times every day.

This story isn't an exception. The exceptional thing about it is that they got nailed so hard on it they were forced to retract, not that they had stuff to be retracted.

I'm not defending the story at all. It ran on the word of two insiders, one of them anonymous. It turned out to be wrong. No shock there. And news production is in no way associated with exceptional care - and never has been. It's associated with rushing copy out for tight deadlines.

There are lots of problems with the way news is made. But in this case, what was actually reported ('officials say Russia implicated') is true. What seems to be false is that the officials' claims had any merit. Newsroom incentives are to get breaking news out. That's one reason a lot of stuff in the papers is wrong.

Incidentally, investigative journalists don't do breaking news - they run long term investigations, which are usually published as such. They're massively important, but not a panacea for poor news coverage.