Well, this is embarrassing.

Despite the MSM having “layers and layers” of fact-checkers, Time Magazine didn’t seem to know that Chornobyl (or Chernobyl, depending upon whom you ask) is located in Ukraine.

How Ukraine's dam collapse could become the country's 'Chernobyl' https://t.co/KWPP4aIaKA

— TIME (@TIME) June 12, 2023

This is a perfect example of how desperately stupid and ignorant the MSM has become. Yes, indeed the dam collapse is in fact a humanitarian crisis, but it will never become Ukraine’s Chornobyl because Chornobyl is Ukraine’s Chornobyl.

Find another metaphor, Time.

The MSM is a shell of its former self. It has spent a few decades living off the social capital it built up over several decades. Its credibility has been eroding as its staffing levels have and its partisan bent has become impossible to ignore. A few decades ago–probably even 15 years ago–some editor would have noticed this glaring problem and corrected it before it was blasted over the internet.

No longer. Those “layers and layers” of fact-checkers were fired long ago. They never were perfect, but they were something.

Most Americans–outside the most highly educated and most partisan people–know that the media is corrupt. Yet even that knowledge is blunted in effect by the fact that they have no other more reliable source to count on. Even most independent journalists don’t have the ability to scour the world firsthand to dig up all the important stories, so we rely upon piecing together disparate sources with pieces of the puzzle and putting it together.

That isn’t the same thing as having foreign correspondents and bureaus around the world, and direct access to government officials.

Yet all those resources–which themselves have been diminishing–mean little if they are simply deployed to promote a narrative that is handed to them. We may as well just read press releases from the government, except in cases where “unnamed” government sources distribute lies to reporters so they can amplify them.

Remember all those stories on the Steele Dossier. Hillary Clinton manufactured it, of course, but it was James Comey who got the ball rolling in the MSM with his leaks to the media backing it up. He has been rewarded by the same media because he disseminated lies to them that they happily repeated.

After all, they made money repeating those lies. Lies about Trump were great for the bottom line. Look at CNN post-Trump. Dying.

The decline in the media is now so dramatic that even the simplest facts are simply unknown to MSM outlets. A simple search would have revealed that Chornobyl is, in fact, in Ukraine. Heck, most people know that without looking it up.

But, of course, it didn’t matter enough for a major news magazine to check before printing this embarrassing headline.

Time of course stealth edited the headline, trying to hide that fact. Yet it is all over Twitter.

Someone @TIME wrote this headline. Someone else at Time *approved* this headline. So that's two people who still don't know where Chernobyl is, although we should probably be grateful that they have at least heard of it. The real journalist who wrote the article must be fuming. pic.twitter.com/zwpm9ZyIIA

— Stephen #AntiGrowthCoalition (@SonOfISayPorter) June 12, 2023

But even scrubbing their website was done sloppily. Stubs elsewhere on the site still refer to the original headline, and it will take a while to clean them out, which they eventually will.

Millions of Americans still trust the MSM, either explicitly or implicitly. Democrats still trust the media, mostly, and as I said the rest of us still depend on them for basic information.

Yet they know nothing. Absolutely nothing. They are more clueless than many High School students who have studied a modicum of history.

Pathetic.