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New York Times throws a bit of cold water on BuzzFeed's explosive -- and now seriously challenged -- report that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress: nytimes.com/2019/01/18/us/… 
All day long, the major cable networks and BuzzFeed's print competitors asserted that they couldn't independently confirm the BuzzFeed reporting, leaving BuzzFeed alone with its sources. 2/
As I wrote yesterday, there've been other controversial enduring or "permanent exclusives" of late, including Bloomberg China hack piece, Cohen-in-Prague and Assange-Manafort. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/… 3/
Despite the president's claims that the entire media is arrayed against him, the absence of a pile-on with respect to these stories indicates otherwise -- that media organizations actually have their own, independent reportorial standards! 4/
Cable news, though, remains a significant problem. I watched mostly CNN and MSNBC today, and even though both declared that they couldn't independently confirm the BuzzFeed reporting, they filled their airwaves with chatter about the story. 5/
I am not saying that the BuzzFeed report is definitively wrong -- merely that if the cable news networks can't confirm something, is it too much to ask that they spend the day chatting about stories that they CAN confirm? 6/
Now, the cable-news position is undoubtedly that, well, everyone was talking about it, so we covered it. But that's a tautological proposition: Everyone was talking about it in large part because cable news was programming it. 7/
