In December 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the US electric grid through a Vermont utility company, leaving millions without heat.

This was serious stuff: President Barack Obama, the paper ominously noted, had been concerned that Moscow might also have sought to “disrupt the counting of votes on Election Day,” one month previously.

As it turned out, the piece had some journalistic lapses — namely that it failed to report that the laptop in question wasn’t connected to the grid, so there was no way Russian malware could have crashed the system.

The Post never bothered retracting the piece, instead appending one of its anodyne “editor’s notes” and reporting on the subsequent, completely pointless, investigation it had sparked with a bad story.

Everyone makes mistakes. In the old days, journalists would probably have been more judicious moving forward.

The Post, which only a month earlier had walked back a similarly alarmist piece about Vladimir Putin’s weak agitprop, went in a different direction, becoming a clearinghouse for the Russia-collusion panic that enveloped American politics.

Indeed, in 2018, the paper won Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting on the........

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