{"id":50177,"date":"2017-01-05T03:51:24","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T11:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/?p=50177"},"modified":"2017-01-05T03:52:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T11:52:00","slug":"washpost-is-richly-rewarded-for-false-news-about-russia-threat-while-public-is-deceived","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/?p=50177","title":{"rendered":"WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via: The Intercept<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of \u201cfake news,\u201d the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false.<\/strong> Each now bears a humiliating editor\u2019s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.<\/p>\n

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no \u201cpenetration of the U.S. electricity grid\u201d as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor\u2019s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that \u201cthe incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility\u201d and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.<\/p>\n

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That\u2019s because journalists \u2014 including those at the Post \u2014 aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper\u2019s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).<\/p>\n

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via: The Intercept: In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of \u201cfake news,\u201d the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-perception-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50179,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177\/revisions\/50179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}