Journalists should sweat accuracy every day. Because they’re journalists. Because that’s what we do. People and outlets which don’t live up to those standards should lose credibility and maybe go under because of it. None of this should be part of measuring up to Donald Trump’s standard. We don’t have a fierce and uncompromising media critic as President. We have a President who is deeply hostile to press freedoms altogether. This is a straight line connecting his pre-political days with his Presidency. He doesn’t want better journalism. He hates the idea that news organizations are able to report things he doesn’t like. More generally, the press is an independent locus of power in a vibrant civil society. He wants all power. So the press is in the way.

We don’t know just why Lindsey Graham is suddenly shifting over to becoming a 100% Trump loyalists. It is certainly not because of a handful of rapidly corrected reporting errors. What is far more likely is that Graham is falling into line with the increasingly authoritarian, anti-rule-of-law American right, of which Trump is simply a symptom as well as a catalyst.

We have freedom of speech and press rights as the first amendment to the constitution. We don’t have to earn it. It’s a right. Journalists, like every other profession, make mistakes. They make mistakes and they get corrected. If they are particularly egregious news organizations can face civil penalties for those mistakes. We should not ignore the fact that the press is now involved in a herculean task of prying free the truth of what happened last year as the President, with all the authority of the state behind him, tries to keep it all hidden.