And part of the problem is that journalism has long since forgotten this purpose and standards across the board are slacking. Look at the defamation and fraud cases; the race to the first hot take without analysis or investigation; the habit of patch writing, that common plagiarism of cutting and pasting bits of others’ stories to get the topic up for your site; the Ben Rhodes story about feeding narratives to young journalists who “know nothing”; the lazy editing standards, both for fact checking and text.

I could go on, but I’m pushing it with serial semi colons in a Medium comment as it is. Journalism needs to bring its once strenuous standards to internet sites that wish to be called news. They will be islands in a sea of yellow journalism. We will never get rid of that, nor would we want to. But we need those islands.