Wise Up?

That’s what Holman Jenkins says our press needs to do regarding Russian propaganda. The headline and subhead give the gist of his plea:

Media Needs to Wise Up about Russian Propaganda
If the press wants to be an antidote and not a tool, take a closer look at the motives at work.

On what basis does Jenkins think our press isn’t already wise and doing the things which dismay him so much on purpose? He even closed is missive with this [emphasis added]:

In our new era of active disinformation, the deliberate propaganda efforts of, say, the US government, deliberately transmitted by an unanalytical domestic press, will have an almost infinitely larger effect on public attitudes than anonymous dribblings governments secrete on the internet via social-media posts.

Our press knows full well what it is doing; it is already wised up—its support for any disinformation that’s convenient to its own narrative is deep and broad. And that includes focusing on Vladimir Putin’s election interferences, such as they are, as distractions from our press’ own far more massive election interferences (to which Jenkins does grudgingly allude) with its spiking of inconvenient stories and pushing convenient ones.

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