This week a big media outlet disgraced itself. Nothing new there, the cynical will say. But for people who believe that journalists try to do important work ethically, often against big and powerful obstacles, it is difficult to imagine a bigger abrogation of journalistic responsibility than that committed by the online news website Buzzfeed, which under the cloak of public interest instead acted with pure, irrepressible malice.

The target was the president-elect of the US, Donald J. Trump. Buzzfeed published, in its entirety, what was purported to be a dossier compiled by a person who claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleging a range of ways that the Russian Government had compromised Trump.

The dossier was compiled for so-called “oppo research”, that is, private investigations for the purposes of political campaigning — a dirt file that could be used by Trump’s opponents against him.

Included among the dossier’s 35 pages are allegations that Vladimir Putin had tried for years to cultivate Trump, and that key members of Trump’s team were part of a conspiracy of cooperation with the Russians to damage Hillary Clinton.

The most headline-grabbing section included salacious allegations of a highly personal nature too offensive to print (albeit many readers have no doubt caught up with the detail).

In publishing the dossier, Buzzfeed noted that the allegations therein were “unverified” and “potentially unverifiable”. “Buzzfeed reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them,” the outlet said. But it published the whole thing anyway.

Included in the paper-thin justification for publication was that this dossier had been doing the rounds in Washington, distributed to various senior politicians, and allegedly the subject of an intelligence briefing to Trump and Barack Obama.

In a note posted to Twitter, Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith said he decided to publish so that “Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of government.”

What nonsense, and what a disgrace. Smith should resign if he is so ignorant of the basic tenet that the journalist’s job is verification before publication. How can people “make up their own minds”, as he so tritely says, without a foundation of facts?

Trump, as you may have seen, used this outrage to his advantage by refusing to engage with a CNN reporter at his first news conference in six months on the basis that the outlet — which reported the dossier’s inclusion in Trump and Obama intelligence briefings, but not its salacious contents — was responsible for disseminating “fake news”.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters (and even those who find him distasteful but are fed up with and distrustful of the media) had further evidence to dismiss the work of mainstream journalists as biased, false or malicious.

It is a slippery slope where the putative leader of the free world can simply dismiss allegations against him as fake.

Yet Buzzfeed’s abrogation of basic journalistic practice has established this terrible precedent at the outset of his presidency. It’s easy to dismiss all this as being confined to those crazy United States, but experience tells us that what begins in the US usually arrives on these shores within a few years.

Amid such tumult, I find myself reflecting on the state of politics and the media, as this will be my last column in the full time employ of The West Australian, after nearly 13 years at the newspaper, the past 6½ covering WA politics.

Over that time the profession has come under incrementally more pressure from a combination of structural changes that are shrinking resources, a growing army of public relations professionals whose job is sometimes to obscure rather than assist, declining community trust in institutions (including politicians and the press) and an increased willingness — as best exemplified by Trump — to discard the old norms of behaviour and standards.

I have always felt fortunate to cover WA politics. This feeling has only increased over time as we observed the deepening cesspool in Canberra now seemingly on an irreversible course, where spin triumphs over substance and the concerns of the political bubble in the nation’s capital become ever more remote from the lives of ordinary citizens.

State government is wonderful and interesting to cover precisely because it interfaces most directly with our everyday lives. State government is the service delivery arm of our system: schools, public hospitals, police, courts, prisons, social workers, roads and public transport.

Sometimes the proposition is advanced that we should do away with the States and let Canberra run the show.

This view could not be more wrong-headed. Services are best delivered when they are devolved close to the people. Lest anyone doubt this, reflect on the performance of the Commonwealth’s largest service delivery agency Centrelink.

Whatever you think of the leaders of our political parties in WA, as someone who has covered them daily and up close, I observe that we are fortunate to be led by politicians who front up, make themselves regularly available, and engage genuinely with the questions that are put to them by the media pack, whose only agenda should be the interests of their audiences: citizens.

In this regard Premier Colin Barnett sets the tone. You may not agree with or even like Barnett, but when asked, he says what he believes — and Mark McGowan and Brendon Grylls (and their predecessors Eric Ripper and Terry Redman) do too.

The comparison when Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott came to town was like chalk and cheese. Press conferences were mostly a waste of time if your aim was to engage on issues, rather than just serve as a stenographer for the centrally dictated political line of the day.

We are lucky to have a far more “real” political culture in WA, and it should be jealously guarded by future leaders and the people who cover them.

Citizens who have turned away from the media have done so for the same reason they are rejecting mainstream political parties — because they no longer believe that the institution is aligned with their interests. You could probably throw big business in here, too.

That is what no reporter or politician should ever forget, that their primary job is to be an ally of the public interest and the concerns of the citizenry: secure and decent employment, fair and reasonable laws, rights and responsibilities, security and safety.

There will always be reasonable disagreement about the best way to achieve those ends — that is the stuff of politics. But when the focus is shifted to personal advancement or gain, or agendas which are not aligned with improving and serving our community, is when the institutions come unstuck.

It has been a great privilege to have a front-row seat to these debates as the State political editor of this 184-year-old institution. From Monday I will take up the debate from behind the microphone on the 6PR Morning Program, but thanks to the good grace of the editor, Brett McCarthy, will continue to have the privilege of sharing my thoughts with you on these pages.

To every reader who has offered a tip, advice, criticism and praise, thank you. I have always tried to serve you, and appreciated it when you pointed out where I fell short.