The man responsible for publishing one of the greatest media hoaxes in recent memory thinks it might be a good idea if the government provided the press with subsidies to help it fight fake news.

Jann S. Wenner is the co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, which published a story on Nov. 19, 2014, alleging that "Jackie," a student at the University of Virginia, had been gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation.

The report was proven to be totally false, however, and "Jackie" a wild fabulist, but not before UVA suspended the fraternity and the university itself suffered a major blow to its reputation.

Wenner defended the since-retracted story and its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, right up to the bitter end.

In an interview published this week, Wenner wondered aloud in a conversation with President Obama whether the federal government should provide media with subsidies to help them combat the rising tide of fake news stories on social media.

The Rolling Stone publisher asked, "So how do you think we go about stitching the country back together?"

Obama replied:

Well, the most important thing that I'm focused on is how we create a common set of facts. ... The biggest challenge that I think we have right now in terms of this divide is that the country receives information from completely different sources. And it's getting worse. The whole movement away from curated journalism to Facebook pages, in which an article on climate change by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist looks pretty much as credible as an article written by a guy in his underwear in a basement, or worse. Or something written by the Koch brothers. People are no longer talking to each other; they're just occupying their different spheres. And in an Internet era where we still value a free press and we don't want censorship of the Internet, that's a hard problem to solve. I think it's one that requires those who are controlling these media to think carefully about their responsibilities, and [whether there] are ways to create a better conversation.

"Maybe the news business and the newspaper industry, which is being destroyed by Facebook, needs a subsidy so we can maintain a free press?" Wenner asked.

Obama replied:

The challenge is, the technology is moving so fast that it's less an issue of traditional media losing money. The New York Times is still making money. NPR is doing well. Yeah, it's a nonprofit, but it has a growing audience. The problem is segmentation. We were talking about the issue of a divided country. Good journalism continues to this day. There's great work done in Rolling Stone. The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It's making people exaggerate or say what's most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs. And if we are gonna solve that, it's not going to be simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media; it's going to be figuring out how do we organize in a virtual world the same way we organize in the physical world. We have to come up with new models.

Erdely, whose reporting ethics were questionable even prior to the UVA rape hoax, mounted a defiant defense of her article when it first came under scrutiny. Her protestation couldn't stop the truth from coming out, though.

Rolling Stone eventually terminated its contract with Erderly, and her report, titled "A Rape on Campus," was retracted in its entirety in April 2015.

A jury ruled later on Nov. 4, 2016, that she was responsible for defamation with actual malice. The jury decided three days later that both Erderly and Rolling Stone were liable for $3 million in damages to Nicole Eramo, the associate dean of students at the University of Virginia.

The report was named the "the Worst Journalism of 2014" by Columbia Journalism Review. The Poynter Institute awarded it the "Error of the Year."

Conservative author and pundit Ed Morrissey was not impressed with Wenner's musings this week. Quite the opposite, in fact:

"Wenner, a publisher who just got socked with a $3 million judgment for maliciously publishing a false story, is asking Obama for subsidies to counter the effects of supposed 'fake news' from Facebook," he wrote.

"It's rare to see this much irony and cluelessness in the open, and it's even rarer to see such a naked plea for cronyism while supposedly speaking truth to power. It's both shameless and shameful," Morrissey added.