ED MORRISSEY: How Very Meta: Journalists Leaking to Journalists in ABC News Meltdown.

Want to know why Americans trust the media less than Congress and used-car salespeople? Greta Van Susteren highlighted one key manner of manipulation reporters and news orgs employ, even when reporting on the news industry itself.

Late yesterday, the New York Post reported that “Furious George” Stephanopoulos felt humiliated and betrayed by ABC News for shelling out $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s defamation claim. As John wrote last night, Stephanopoulos has made himself scarce on social media for the last few weeks as this percolated between the lawyers. In retrospect, ABC’s decision to have David Muir moderate the debate rather than Stephanopoulos might have been a hint that they had lost confidence in Stephanopoulos’ judgment — although Muir turned out to be a disaster anyway.

Now, this kind of story is why we use the “Too Good to Check” label. Of course we want people who falsify the news to feel “humiliated” as a result. But if Stephanopoulos has gone silent and ABC’s only offering press releases, how do we know that Stephanopouls feels humiliated and betrayed? Because several people inside ABC News want us to know it — although they don’t want to put their names to it.

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This is exactly how mainstream media orgs — and yes, even the NY Post falls into that category, as much as we enjoy their work otherwise — use Anonymice to manipulate readers and promote bogus narratives. Media orgs insist that anonymous sourcing is critical to their ability to report on malfeasance by people in power, and that may well be the case, but … how exactly does that apply to this story? Or for that matter, practically any story published these days on the basis of Anonymice?

Back in 2003 Virginia Postrel explored “Press Pathologies:”

Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it’s the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can’t lose. Then he’s a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.

The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn’t getting the great stories in the British press, “They’re great stories. But they aren’t true.”

The fever swamp dreams the DNC-MSM conjured up in the wake of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 in an effort to sink his presidency have rendered so much of their output as radioactive. Though it is fun in the wake of his second victory to see them devouring themselves.