WaPo Admits Key Part Of 'Fake News' Story Might Be Fake

WaPo Admits Key Part Of 'Fake News' Story Might Be Fake | The Daily Caller
"The Washington Post said a key part of its big story exposing “fake news” sites might not be credible Wednesday, writing in an editor’s note that the paper can’t “vouch for the validity” of a report heavily cited in the story.
“The post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so,” the note now running at the top of the story reads.
PropOrNot is an anonymous group that compiled a list of hundreds of sites they deemed “routine peddlers” of Russian propagandists, as part of a report on the Russian’s influence during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
The Washington Post used PropOrNot’s report prominently in its own story on how Russian propagandists created and leveraged fake news during the cycle.
One of the sites listed in PropOrNot’s report as “fake news” quickly demanded a retraction of the story and threatened to sue The Washington Post for defamation in a letter published Monday.
...Patrick Maines criticized the story in The Hill, calling it “perhaps the shoddiest piece of feature writing since Rolling Stone published its blatantly false story about a campus rape at the University of Virginia.”
“You did not provide even a single example of ‘fake news’ allegedly distributed or promoted by Naked Capitalism or indeed any of the 200 sites on the PropOrNot blacklist,” Naked Capitalism’s lawyer added in the letter.
“You provided no discussion or assessment of the credentials or backgrounds of these so-called ‘researchers’ (Clint Watts, Andrew Weisburd, and J.M. Berger and the ‘team’ at PropOrNot), and no discussion or analysis of the methodology, protocol or algorithms such ‘researchers’ may or may not have followed.”