The media occasionally sort of becomes unhinged and only talking to itself. It's hard to attribute why this happened but effectively the consequences is that journalistic ethics standards go out the window. This almost always results in people dying. This kind of behaviour is what starts wars or gets politicians assassinated.

Since this is NYT I'll use an example from NYT.

January 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-...

Ok fair. NYtimes reporting that phones got tapped. Not exactly a surprise given snowden and how easy it is to get such data. Almost 100% this article is true.

March 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-t...

Wait... trump isn't offering the Nytimes their own article? Only months later? By the same author? Does Michael S Schmidt smoke a ton of weed and forgot he himself wrote the article explaining it?

So the fact checkers come down and clearly show Schmidt his article saying he must retract?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/mar/16/donald-tru...

Oh no. Fact checkers kind of got this one wrong.

My point... it isn't about facts. Journalistic standard #1 is honesty. They clearly broke the most important rule.

It goes further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spygate_(conspiracy_theory)

It's a conspiracy theory! Not only is it false...

This is the media falling from journalistic standards. Every single time in history where the media does this, people die. In the USA, the last major time the media did this, Mckinley got assassinated.