Gamers Repeat "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" with a Chuckle, but Journalists Repeat "We've Deployed the Recommended" with a Straight Face

On July 18th, Joe Uchill of The Hill turned a quotation from the DNC into gibberish by ending a sentence prematurely. Check out his final paragraph, which I have pasted below exactly as it appears in his article:

“Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April,” that statement read, “and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

Again, that final period is Uchill's editorial insertion, not mine. The full sentence that he abridged into meaninglessness is a chestnut that first appeared in various media outlets (such as CNN) in mid-June: "We've deployed the recommended technology so that today our systems are secure thanks to a swift response to that attack and we will continue to monitor our systems closely."

So you're probably thinking: "What's the big deal? Uchill obviously made a mistake. It's a cut-and-paste error. Those happen all the time."

You're right. It isn't a big deal that Uchill made an error, but it is worth noting that other press outlets have simply repeated that error without commenting on it (or even noticing it).

Here's a passage from Michael Sainato's latest piece on Guccifer 2.0 for The Observer:

Instead of confirming or denying the validity of the documents, the DNC has reverberated the same tired excuse, claiming Russian hackers are responsible: “Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

While the DNC and Clinton campaign have called for party unity, Clinton has continued the politically-expedient tactic of adopting several of Sanders’ popular ideas.

I don't have a problem with Sainato quoting Uchill, but I find it strange that he didn't bother to read the material he quoted--since anyone who reads "We've deployed the recommended" is bound to wonder what happened to the rest of the sentence.

Sainato isn't alone. Uchill's meaningless formulation was also repeated (without comment) by The Nagaland Post and Investment Watch.

This isn't just a case of Uchill making a mistake; it's a case of multiple journalistic outfits failing to recognize that mistake for what it is--probably because they all know better than to read anything inside a quotation attributed to the DNC.

Our journalists believe that their job is simply to repeat whatever our political parties tell them, not to evaluate quotations for accuracy or even intelligibility. Worse yet, since they know that whatever appears inside quotation marks from a political source is almost certainly a lie, they protect themselves from that dishonesty by NOT reading the material in question even as they are in the process of PRESENTING it to their audience.

This is the state of the fourth estate in America is 2016.