But the media told me it was the russians! Surely well established media cannot be sending out fake news deliberately!?
it is very easy to confirm. If there are fingerprints left with visible traces of canned pork fat ("tushonka") then it was really russians. (For whom remember - "The 18th moment of Spring or How do hedgehogs procreate.")
Visit card or passport left in place is much better than tushonka. It's long way for CIA.
Unfortunately, they'll be around for a long time, and definitely long enough to get away with the current popular trick: publishing lies, waiting for other organizations to reprint those lies, then issuing corrections quietly so that rubes talk about how that's proof of integrity.
Please that is the problem here. Constant looking for sides and making false statements while pretending to be the "one" that knows the truth in comments.
The list of campaign donors to the DNC showed that media organizations as affiliated with the Democratic Party. They picked their sides; post-hoc documentation did not do this.
Further, recognizing corruption and lack of journalistic integrity doesn't mean that I'm pretending to be some sort of political prophet -- if anything, it's a bigger problem that those who criticize misinformation are expected to provide a equal counterbalance.
s/showed that media organizations as/showed that media organizations are/
not sure what happened to my english there
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).
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.
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.
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.