Pink Slime

When you run across a headline or lede that confirms all your suspicions about Those Guys and fills you with righteous indignation, how much digging do you do before sharing it?

This is the tale of a fake news story, widely shared by a lot of smart people who so badly wanted for it to be true that they didn’t care that it wasn’t. It is also the tale of the decline of local news in America, the wave of pink slime that is replacing it, feeding destructive partisan narratives about public institutions.

This sort of thing is arsenic for the body politic.

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