See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says! I’m smart, and I want respect!“
Excuse me while I gleefully gloat over pointing out once again what a rotten, biased, disgrace of a news organization NPR is (and has been for a long while) right before it beclowned itself spectacularly yesterday by breaking the imaginary story that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the Supreme Court.
No, you can’t excuse this putrid example of the variety of fake news I call “Wishin’ and Hopin’ News” (in honor of the late, great Dusty Springfield) with the rationalization (#19 on the list) “Anyone can make a mistake!” For a professional news organization that has any scruples or legitimate editorial procedures literally never makes a mistake like this. NPR didn’t check its “facts” with the subject of the story. It didn’t get confirmation from the Supreme Court. It literally broke a story that didn’t exist because the Axis and the Axis propaganda network and the Trump Deranged and so, so many fans of NPR wanted this to be true so badly that NPR decided that Ethics Don’t Matter….though, to be fair, NPR decided this long, long ago, as when, oh, just to pick a random example out of the air, they blacklisted me as the network’s go-to ethics expert after a woke hostess deemed my 100% accurate explanation of how celebrities are vulnerable to late-hit sexual harassment accusations intolerable because, she told me, “I thought you were trying to defend Donald Trump.”
I may use the Alito episode from now on as my routine example of confirmation bias. The fiasco is so wonderful for Ethics Alarms in so many ways!
Ethics Alarms 
As someone amusing quipped on twitter:
At least this time NPR is only accidentally pushing fake news.
I think this one deserves…
“I was looking to see who else was reporting it, and nobody was reporting it, and then, basically, we realized that it was not true,” Calamur said. “She called and said, ‘I made a mistake,’ and we rushed to make a retraction.”
So, they way they verify truth is to look and see what the rest of the herd is parroting.
The Ministry of Truth to be composed of departments of consensus to include but not be limited to party consensus, scientific consensus and journalistic consensus.