The media are broken, and I don’t mean they are suffering from a small crack in their facade. They’ve thrown themselves off a cliff and are now shattered into a million pieces. In other words, there’s no coming back when it comes to their credibility.

Case in point? This ridiculous “fact-check” by USA Today.

The claim: Trump campaign shirts feature imperial eagle, a Nazi symbol

Our ruling: True https://t.co/3eCiYdgQvK

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 12, 2020

What’s actually being fact-checked here is a bit confusing. If you go by their headline, they seem to be proclaiming that the Trump campaign definitively and actively used a Nazi symbol. That’s 100% purposeful on their part. They know few will actually click the article to read the caveats. One of the chief tactics used by the left-wing media in the Trump era is to put something knowingly false (or highly misleading) out in the public discourse, come back later to “clarify it,” and then bask in the fact that the original false claim becomes conventional wisdom.

And clarify USA Today did.

Clarification: The claim that Trump 2020 has put out a T-shirt with a symbol similar to a Nazi eagle and is being criticized for it is true. Worth noting, the eagle is a longtime US symbol, too.

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 12, 2020

Oh, it’s “worth noting” that the perched eagle with wings spread is not actually a “nazi symbol” any more than the cross is a nazi symbol? Well, that’s good to know. That seems like the kind of thing that should have precluded any “fact-check” from being done in the first place on this ridiculous claim.

The Trump shirt was clearly a copy of popular U.S. Military symbology, symbology that existed prior to the creation of the Nazi Party in Weimar Republic era Germany. For comparison, this would be like saying that Christians are using a nazi symbol because we use the cross, which was also a symbol used by Hitler.

USA Today tries to wiggle out of the clear insinuation they are making by proposing that they are actually “fact-checking” the existence of claims that Trump used a nazi symbol. Wait, so fact-checkers are wasting time researching whether Twitter users are saying things or not?

What happened here is simple. USA Today knew that they’d have to rule it false if they fact-checked the specific claim of whether Trump used a nazi symbol. He clearly didn’t use a nazi symbol. He copied a widely used American symbol. But by sleight of hand, they instead cleverly shifted to saying they were just proving that claims of the original claim existed, which is not fact-checking at all. You don’t get that “clarification” from USA Today until the end of the article after 1000+ words of riffing on nazis and eagles.

This is narrative pushing at its worst. It’s taking something mundane and attempting to project evil on it. The goal here was clear. Make Trump look like a nazi, and a supposed unbiased, mainstream outlet saw nothing wrong with publishing this garbage fact-check.