TrumpScratch.com Story "Too Good To Check" -- The Motto Of Far Too Many Mainstream Journalists
I saw the story about the TrumpScratch.com site -- supposedly or apparently changed to KittenFeed.com -- where visitors can swipe at images of Trump's face with a kitten's paw. (I did a bit of that for about 15 seconds yesterday in looking at the site.)

There was supposedly cease-and-desist letter supposedly sent by the Trump Organization's lawyer -- no proof of which was provided by the New York Observer or the other publication that I saw that wrote about it -- and I didn't see credible evidence that it was for realz.

Well, this morning, Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote that he felt similarly:

Yesterday I decided not to write a post about a San Francisco teenager who supposedly received cease-and-desist letters from the Trump Organization in response to her website mocking the president. Although the widely repeated story was sadly plausible in light of Donald Trump's legendary touchiness and litigiousness, the teenager, identified only as "Lucy," was interviewed by just two outlets, neither of which posted copies of the letters, which the Trump Organization unequivocally denied sending. I contacted the reporters who had communicated with Lucy to see whether and how they had verified the existence of the letters but did not hear back from them. For a good reason, it turns out: The story was a hoax, and the reasons so many writers fell for it are instructive.

...As Bryan Menegus points out at Gizmodo (which initially repeated the story, along with Fox News, the New York Daily News, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Raw Story, New York, and various other outlets), the timing of the letter is problematic, since it supposedly was sent "three weeks after the site went live," and "trumpscratch.com was first registered on March 22"--the day after the Observer story. (The Washington Free Beacon's Alex Griswold made the same point on Wednesday.) Furthermore, Menegus says, KittenFeed.com "was registered before trumpscratch.com" and acquired by its current owner "around March 2," which contradicts Lucy's story. Yesterday Snopes noted the same clues that Lucy, or whoever played that character, was not on the level.

...Anti-Trump bias is not the only reason this hoax succeeded. The story was accepted because it was consistent with what we know about Trump's character from his behavior before and after he took office. He is an amazingly vain, petty, and thin-skinned man, the sort who publicly brags about the size of his penis and the size of his inauguration audience, who files frivolous lawsuits against people who insult, mock, or diminish him, and who has never hesitated to bully critics with threatening letters from his lawyers.

Yesterday Newsweek ran a piece by Ryan Bort that used the phony Lucy story as a news hook for a review of "Donald Trump's ridiculous cease-and-desist letters"...

Newsweek!

Whatever happened to mean editors who don't let you run with a story unless there's really strong supporting info behind it? Movie fiction, perhaps.

But I think the need to outclickbait every other site in hopes of winning the battle for scarce ad dollars plays a substantial part.

I write only one column -- my science-based advice column -- per week, because each takes a substantial amount of time poring over studies, poring over related studies, and then -- often -- deciding to throw out a bit of information because it didn't hold up.

I could have made a lot more money over the years writing a daily column, but I turned down requests and suggestions that I do that, because I can't do that in any responsible way -- and frankly, nor do I think anybody else can or does.

My column is also funny, and admittedly, coming up with humor takes some time. However, what takes the most time is reading, vetting, and finally, translating science so it can be understood by the average person and be used by them to make some difference in their life (or just understand being human a little better).

The problem is, it's increasingly hard to get paid for this kind of writing -- papers are doing really badly. And that's sad, and when newswriting about serious issues is trying to stay alive under this model, we suffer and democracy suffers. And that really sucks and I don't have an answer to the problem.

This isn't to say there haven't always been shoddy journalists. Walter Duranty is a famous case in point. But even good, fact-checking-obsessed journalists don't have the time they used to or the support they used to do responsible work.