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Flawed: yes. Fake: no. And, sometimes, extremely useful.

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That was the portrait of the mainstream news media that emerged from former FBI director James Comey’s appearance Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

At various times, Comey portrayed journalists as getting the story wrong. He denounced a Feb. 14 New York Times article as almost entirely inaccurate, and spoke of “many, many stories” that are “just dead wrong.” (The Times said in a tweeted statement Thursday afternooon that editors are looking into the article in question, which said that Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.)

“The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, writing stories about classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it,” he said.

(Or, shorter, from Lao Tzu: “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”)

Yet much of Comey’s testimony reinforced or confirmed the bulk of the reporting – including from the Times and certainly from The Washington Post and others – that has dominated the news in recent weeks. One example among many is the reporting that led to the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn over issues surrounding his conversations with Russian officials.