Following up on yesterday’s post about Stephen Walt’s article, I have to issue a minor mea culpa. I used a Washington Post story about the State Department resignations as an illustration of a larger point Walt was making about the importance of having a bureaucracy that functions well. That story has since come under widespread criticism for misrepresenting both the cause and the scale of the resignations.

So, the mea culpa is: I should have known better. I call it a minor mea culpa for two reasons: first, because I was hardly banging the table about what an outrage the resignations were (I was just saying: here’s an example of the sort of thing Walt is talking about), and, indeed, I was clear in my citation of the story that we didn’t really know enough to judge what the real reasons were for these officials’ departure; and second, because nobody’s going to get this stuff right all the time, and the real test of integrity is whether you correct and learn from your mistakes, not whether you never make them.

Which leads me to a larger point. Do news organizations need to be “especially careful” in the age of Trump, because if they get anything wrong they will discredit their entire enterprise? No: news organizations should always be careful — there’s nothing special about the age of Trump in that regard. And they’ll still sometimes get stuff wrong. That shouldn’t make us “distrust the media” and get all our information from “alternative” sources that take even less care. It just means that “trust, but verify” remains an excellent maxim for dealing with both friendly and hostile media outlets.

If the media gets increasingly hysterical, in other words, that’s unfortunate, whether they wind up hyping everything that happens as the beginning of the apocalypse or whether they channel that hysteria into being “extra careful.” But we shouldn’t get hysterical about that in response. That would just compound the problem.

Instead, I endorse Alan Jacobs’s suggestion (seconded by Rod Dreher) that we all “get a longer news frequency.” I can’t think of a better way to approach life under a president who doesn’t read books and spends lots of time on Twitter than to do the opposite. And there’s no contradiction between doing that and also taking concrete actions, personal or political, on issues that actually matter to you.