The last ten days or so of NSA coverage represents a dark chapter in the short history of digital journalism. This is the era of link bait — the exploitation of the viral kneejerk outrage of readers who accept headlines at face value and circulate those headlines without questioning the accuracy of the reporting as long as it confirms their bias. The false, misleading reporting that’s been hurried into the tubes recently has taken on a Fox News Channel publicity model: be the first to get the attention of the audience no matter what, then suss out the facts later (if at all) when no one’s paying attention any more.

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It happened with the Washington Post‘s initial PRISM story, it happened with Glenn Greenwald’s story in which he wrote that the NSA has “direct access” to servers owned by the various tech giants and, over the weekend, it happened in spectacular fashion with a bombshell article posted on CNET by chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh.

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It’s entirely unclear who or which entity made the “opposite” statement to what Mueller testified. Nadler could’ve been referring to an NSA official in the meeting, or he could’ve been referring to a screening of the Snowden video during the meeting, or he could’ve simply been flummoxed about the complicated process. As you can plainly see in the above transcript, Nadler appeared to be confused between the notion of “listening” to calls and acquiring “information” from a phone, which are two very different things with varying layers of oversight. But the details and word usages were vague and scrambled and the meaning was lost. Somehow, though, McCullagh took a super-colossal leap from this perplexing back-and-forth to the bombshell conclusion that the NSA admitted to listening to phone calls at any time without a warrant.

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However, the NSA admitted no such thing, and there was nothing from the NSA in McCullagh’s article confirming such an admission. Nadler didn’t even say the acronym “NSA” during the exchange. But… too late. The untrue version was out there already, hyperlinked and retweeted at light speed by otherwise smart, respectable sources.