Since the news broke, we have learned a fair amount about the facts on which the intelligence agency may have based its conclusion, while the C.I.A. findings themselves remain classified. This newspaper published a detailed story that synthesized new and previously known information. Readers learned that the bulk of the Democratic National Committee’s emails had been obtained by means of fairly low-tech phishing. Reuters published a story pointing out that the known evidence falls short of proving that Russian hackers intended to benefit Mr. Trump rather than simply cause havoc — and that the office of the director of national intelligence has not endorsed the C.I.A. interpretation. But this report got lost in a barrage of stories striving to prove that the C.I.A. is right and Mr. Trump is wrong.

The overwhelming amount of detail some of these stories supplied, and the sheer volume of reports on the Russian election-hack scandal over the past week have created the illusion of rich public discussion. But this discussion has focused on something that should not be a matter of argument at all: The question of whether Mr. Trump is right to disregard C.I.A. conclusions, which are based on information unavailable to the journalists. Editorial and opinion writers have repeatedly condemned Mr. Trump’s denial and called for a full investigation into the hacking. This should go without saying. But when journalists are busy proving the obvious, they ignore the important questions. Arguing about facts is, in fact, the ultimate distraction.

If there is one trait that Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia share over all others, it is their understanding of the power of separating facts from truth. By denying known and provable facts — as when Mr. Trump denies making statements he has made — or by rejecting facts that are not publicly known, as with the C.I.A.’s information on Russian hacking, Mr. Trump exercises his ever-growing power over the public sphere. The resulting frenzy of trying to prove either the obvious known facts or the classified and therefore unknowable facts — two fruitless pursuits — creates so much static that we forget what we are really talking about.

Let us imagine the conversation we would be having if we were not preoccupied with Mr. Trump’s denial of the C.I.A.’s conclusions. We would now be discussing the appropriate response to the hacking. We would be talking about consequences for the American electoral process in general and for the results of this election in particular. We would be asking why it matters if Russia’s hacking efforts were intended to benefit Mr. Trump. But in the heat of arguing about facts, journalists and pundits have acted as though the answers to these questions are obvious. They are not.

The discussion so far — and the calls for invalidating the election results — have largely ignored the question of the role that the Russian attempt to help actually played in Mr. Trump’s victory. This effect would be very difficult to measure, but consider the consequences of ignoring this question: Imagine that you are taking an important test and someone has sent you the answers in the mail. The testing authority does not consider whether you asked for these answers, whether you looked at them, and whether they were correct: It invalidates your test results simply because the answers were sent to you. This would, of course, be grossly unfair. What’s worse, it would give anyone the power to prevent you from ever passing a test — all one would have to do is throw an envelope in the mailbox. Similarly, if the American media and a large part of the American public believe that the election was invalid simply because Russians wanted Mr. Trump to win, we are giving Russia outsize influence over American elections, now and in the future.