Erik Wemple, the Washington Post’s media critic, has produced an 11-part series (so far) on the press’s handling of the Steele dossier in the wake of its debunking by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The 10th installment consists of a simple “inventory” of TV talking heads and reporters insisting that large parts of the dossier had been “corroborated.” Notice that the statements Mr. Wemple has collected are mere declarations, the speakers offering little evidence or specificity about which parts had been corroborated. This is not journalism. This is availability bias, the social-science term for a readiness to embrace and repeat claims that are popular in one’s milieu.

He finds exactly one example of reporters claiming to have validated a Steele allegation through actual reporting—McClatchy’s famous story, which it continues to “stand by,” that Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 campaign. Read closely, though, and McClatchy only claims to have cited its anonymous sources accurately. No statement is offered that Mr. Cohen was actually in Prague.

I addressed another partial example myself here in February 2018—a Politico story that found a Steele allegation about Carter Page more believable because a Steele source seemed to know in advance about a Rosneft transaction that would not take place until late in 2016. As I showed, the whole world knew about the pending sale and had for years. This was an example of what Mr. Horowitz would later call a sprinkling of “publicly available” information in Steele that created a patina of credibility for the unwary.

Whether this was honest or dishonest dimwittedness by Politico, it is emblematic of a pattern that increasingly prevails in newsrooms—seeing only evidence that supports the desired story line.