BuzzFeed was inaccurate to release the Trump rumours. Here’s why|Jane Martinson

Other news organisations, including the Guardian, had seen the dossier but were unable to verify its asserts. In is recommended that the role of journalists is simply to put the information out there and allow readers to make up their own minds, Smith put himself at the centre of a huge combat being waged in the media.

For the media is currently at war, an information war in which no one actually knows who or what to trust, and the nature of truth itself is in danger. Careless talk in any combat costs lives, which is one way to explain the furore over BuzzFeeds decision.

The much-respected media columnist and former public editor of the New York Times Margaret Sullivan accused Buzzfeed of breaking the golden journalistic regulation that its never been acceptable to publish rumour and innuendo .~ ATAGEND

In an epoch when trust in the media is already in the gutter, this does absolutely nothing to help, she added.

BuzzFeeds defence both in Smiths note and in comments make use of Jim Waterson, its UK political editor, at an event about fake news in London on Wednesday was essentially that the sites readers deserve to read what the media and political upper-clas were reading and talking about, even if not all the claims were true. Waterson, at the ITN-hosted event, said the dossier was being discussed across media circles and across security circles.

News organisations construct difficult editorial decisions all the time, and we all attain mistakes, but such reasoning would have once been welcomed as a sign that the web was part of greater democratic openness. That was before post-truth became the word of the year in 2016.

The wisdom of crowds, which once promised open democracy and truth for all, is now looking like a mob that stamps on the facts because scurrilous lies are not only easier to renders but can be just as popular online.

If journalism is about publishing stuff that everyone is talking about, what makes it different to the sort of unproven nonsense written and published about Obama being the founder of Isis or even that David Cameron had sexuality with a pigs head? Hence Sullivan calling out BuzzFeeds actions as plunging down a slippery ethical slope from which “were not receiving” return.

Publishing something someone doesnt like to hear is pretty much the essence of journalism, at the least the kind that believes itself deserving of a special status, the sort of status that awards audiences with pope or president and the ability to hold the powerful to account. Or, as is often said: Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

But such works, especially investigating the misdeeds of the rich and powerful, costs money, hour and effort to check the facts and guarantees to something, to the best of the writers knowledge, really did happen.

The economics of the news business today find online media platforms such as Facebook set essentially the same value on an outlandish story created by a teen in the Balkans as a fully confirmed investigation such as the Panama Papers.

Not that the economic crisis in the media business explains BuzzFeeds decision entirely: the irony in some ways is that the site was not was published tale for fiscal gain as, unlike much of the old media, which depends on display ad, BuzzFeed is funded by sponsored content. So its news division is all about prestige.

Prestige, trust, truth: flimsy and amorphous but essential for the survival of good journalism, as opposed to rumor and lies. In these dangerous times – both for journalism and the world – newsworthy is not enough. It is incorrect for any respected news organisation to publish information it knows may not be true.