Late last week, the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC News all appended grudging retractions to a sensational story they had converged on about the FBI investigation into Rudolph Giuliani.

All three outlets initially reported that Mr. Giuliani had received formal notification that he’d been the target of a Russian influence operation. But it seems the story was yet another example of complaisant reporters collaborating with motivated law-enforcement sources to taint leading Trump figures with the Russia-collusion smear. The Times’s note told readers that the original story had “misstated”—a word that is doing a lot of work in this context—the information. Corrections, retractions and updates are frequently made with greater stealth these days.

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