At some point the journalistic injunction, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” became “If it fits the Narrative, don’t bother to check it out.”

Rolling Stone — which really ought to know better by now — just ran the mother of all journalistic corrections when it nuked its own weekend story about how gunshot victims were supposedly going begging at several Oklahoma hospitals because the emergency rooms were being overwhelmed with patients who had overdosed on ivermectin. Rachel Maddow and a lot of other progressive stalwarts tweeted out their own versions of the story, all of them rewriting a local TV news broadcaster. Drew Holden has an excellent rundown of all the lefties who promoted this ridiculous urban legend. (Rural legend?) Tell me again about how progressives are the thoughtful, rational thinkers in whom we should place our trust. Maddow’s tweet promoting the false story is still up as I write. (Holden has screen caps  to preserve the record against the deletions to come.)

Rolling Stone was (as far as I can tell) the outlet that took the story national, and it is deservedly getting a lot of ridicule, but only because Rolling Stone is a more high-profile target than the originator of the story, local TV news outlet KFOR. As of this writing (midday on Labor Day), the KFOR story, dated Sept. 1, is still up! But the KFOR story has a giant hole in it: an Oklahoma doctor named Jason McElyea states “patients are packing his eastern and southeastern Oklahoma hospitals after taking ivermectin doses meant for a full-sized horse, because they believed false claims the horse de-wormer could fight COVID-19.” McElyea adds, according to KFOR, that “the ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated….All of their ambulances are stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient in and they don’t have any, that’s it. If there’s no ambulance to take the call, there’s no ambulance to come to the call.”