Rolling Stone took the Internet by storm in late 2014 when it featured a piece chronicling a horrendous rape account at the University of Virginia. According to the report, a young woman named “Jackie” claimed she was gang raped by members of a fraternity, which helped feed the Left’s male-bashing “rape on campus” narrative. Authorities, however, were never able to verify the account, and eventually the story was exposed as complete bunk. Indeed, Rolling Stone just lost a multi-million dollar defamation case to one of the University’s employees. Thus, as a proven purveyor of fake news, the magazine can hardly be considered a reliable source. But that’s not stopping it and others from pretending otherwise.

In a recent interview, Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann S. Wenner asked Barack Obama, who has himself expressed ostensible concern over “fake news,” the following: “Maybe the news business and the newspaper industry, which is being destroyed by Facebook, needs a subsidy so we can maintain a free press?”

Suggesting that the American taxpayers help prop up “legitimate” companies like his is audacious if nothing else. Nevertheless, Obama answered back with an amazingly naive response: “Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone [emphasis added]. The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions.”

To his credit, Obama did also say resolving the matter isn’t “simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media.” But that’s frankly not the point. Obama’s adulation for a publication that, as the Washington Examiner puts it, is “responsible for publishing one of the greatest media hoaxes in recent memory” is simply remarkable.

As Ed Morrissey observes, “It’s rare to see this much irony and cluelessness in the open, and it’s even rarer to see such a naked plea for cronyism while supposedly speaking truth to power. It’s both shameless and shameful.” The Democrats’ quest for honest news is just as fake as their media cohorts’ reporting.

(Edited.)