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

This was serious stuff. President Barack Obama, the paper ominously noted, was concerned that Moscow might also “disrupt the counting of votes on Election Day, potentially leading to a wider conflict.”

As it turned out, the piece had some journalistic lapses, namely that it had 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 had only a month earlier walked back a similarly alarmist piece about Vladimir Putin’s weak agitprop, went in a different direction, becoming a clearing house for the Russia-collusion panic that enveloped American politics.

In 2018, the Post won Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting on the........

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