Let’s start with the first sentence of the linked article: “LAST FRIDAY, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security .”

So the media (including Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/09/22/hackers-targeted-voter-registration-systems-in-21-states-feds-say.html) reported based on official word from the federal government, Department of Homeland Security.

Then, according to your linked article, the DHS backtracked and said their official notification to the states was inaccurate.

Why is it the media’s fault that the government initially lied? Is the writer really arguing that official word from the Department of Homeland Security needs to be fact checked by the media? So, if DHS raises the terror threat level to “imminent,” he expects the media to double and triple source the detail behind that before reporting the new threat level to people?

Look, I fully agree that the MSM is left-biased and find some of the stuff they report on, and much of how they report it, to be crap. (Same can be said about right-biased media, of course.)

But the actual outrage in this whole story shouldn’t be the fact that the media reported it, but that the news they reported on is based on lies from the federal government. Democracy falls apart when we can’t trust what the government tells us.