I feel your clear and general disdain for the press is coloring your interpretation of events here and the reality of editing and sourcing. There was an editor

I feel your clear and general disdain for the press is coloring your interpretation of events here and the reality of editing and sourcing. There was an editorial failure, certainly, but in a rapidly changing situation due to a misunderstanding of the evidence given by a vetted source (such sources are seldom named even internally). Don't forget five or six nations were "squabbling" over the origin and nature of these missiles for days afterwards. Russian missiles did hit Poland, but they were Russian-made, not Russian-launched. It's not hard to imagine how easily this message could be muddled somewhere between Lviv and New York. The person saying US intel was unlikely to be wrong was not evincing a blind trust in government but expressing that a vetted source was unlikely to volunteer information of this nature, in this situation, that was inaccurate, given that Poland had essentially confirmed there was a crisis event unfolding. It was not a third hand story (US intel official claimed direct knowledge), reporters are not second hand (they interpret, contextualize, and synthesize) and editors are not third party (they are an integral part of the news process). News organizations are under immense pressure from every quarter. It is very easy to pick apart the process in retrospect and suggest they should have distrusted a trusted source or questioned the somewhat ambiguous wording of the message from the reporter. News, and reporting about war especially, is complex and messy - remember this all took place within 9 minutes. That does not make these people "doomsday reporters," "hacks," or that they need to be fired and attend remedial journalism school. It was an honest mistake not unique to virtual newsrooms but exacerbated by them. They retracted the story when it was clear that the intel their source provided was mistaken, fired the reporter for, I would guess, failing to communicate and handle the news properly, and likely chastised the editors for erring too far on the side of shipping the news. Sorry for this long comment, I just completely disagree with your assessment.