• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, April 3, 2017

In keeping with today’s toxic political environment, the integrity of all forms of information and communication is disputed at a fundamental level, with all individuals and groups engaged in the production of “news” presumed to be biased in some way.

In addition to undermining news credibility, this worldview effectively excuses the existence of fake news, since the truth is ultimately unknowable.

But this worldview also requires “proof” that “real news” is actually fake, too. Here is where official corrections and retractions come in. If a news organization is forced to modify or withdraw a story, the thinking goes, this must provide some glimpse of its inner workings.

Credible news organization owned up to errors or clarifications.

Yet for some, that brief moment when the curtain falls back and the Wizard of Oz is revealed, means trying but failing to control our perception of reality in keeping with some secret agenda. The notion of a simple mistake as just a mistake, is dismissed either as naïve or a tool to cover up media manipulation.

This is the postmodern fun house where Reuters ended up last night, after it published, then retracted, then re-published a story about the Trump administration.

On Sunday night, Reuters published a story reporting that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a key advisor, was visiting Iraq, citing an unnamed source in the White House. Early on Monday morning, however, Reuters removed the story from its site and tweeted a retraction, reading: “The story ‘Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner visits Iraq, U.S. official says’, the accompanying alert and subsequent update are wrong and are withdrawn.”

Reuters didn’t reveal what prompted the retraction, and the original article appears to have gotten a date wrong, but most of the story turned out to be true.

Kushner is in fact visiting Iraq, although he arrived Monday, not Sunday, as Reuters originally reported, and was subsequently reported by multiple news outlets – including Reuters — in a virtually identical story posted Monday morning.

It’s not clear what was happening internally at Reuters during this odd sequence of events. But the fact the wire service retracted the story in the first place provided an opening for the nihilist legions on social media to accuse it of publishing “fake news.”

Note: That's not “incorrect news,” as in a story containing an incorrect detail, but “fake news,” meaning entirely unreliable.

Indeed, critics emphasize the phrase “fake news” to equate it with other instances of genuine fake news in recent memory. It's a false equivalency —  since a correct story vs, a fake one is not comparable. The Reuters story was largely correct; other examples of fake news are totally fabricated, such as the birther claim about President Obama.

As always, it’s worth noting the goal of these efforts is not to push back on a particular narrative, dispute any specific fact, or even discredit a whole news organization. It is ultimately to create an unstable, contested reality, where the observer feels unable to rely on any knowledge outside their own immediate experience.

The goal is not to convince someone that something is true or untrue, but rather to leave them with the sense that they can no longer make this distinction at all.

Reuters later added: Our story erroneously stated that Jared Kushner and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were in Iraq when they were actually en route to Iraq. We withdrew, rather than corrected, the story because the terms of the embargo did not permit us to disclose the specifics of their itinerary until their arrival in Iraq.

The concern: Now, any time Reuters publishes something viewed as unfavorable to a particular interest, its critics can just point to this occasion (and doubtless some others) when it published something “wrong,” thereby condemning all of its content to the same twilight landscape of doubt and uncertainty.