Donald Trump held a press conference Wednesday in which he blasted BuzzFeed (an online tabloid) and CNN — the former for its release of and the latter for its subsequent irresponsible reporting on a highly dubious and unsubstantiated 35-page dossier that suggested, among other things, a Trump-Russian collusion. The controversial dossier was generated by a private investigation firm called Fusion GPS hired by opponents of Trump’s presidential campaign and had been shared with the FBI and strategic members of the Demo/MSM propaganda machine. But no news outlet could corroborate it and thus deemed it not fit for dissemination. Until BuzzFeed took a break from LOLcats to “report” it, anyway.

Last week, both Barack Obama and Mr. Trump were briefed by the intelligence community, and Trump was made aware of the existence of this fallacious dossier. But that’s where things get fuzzy. At some point, news was leaked that the FBI had referenced this dossier in its intel report — that leak likely originated with FBI Director James Comey. Predictably, it triggered BuzzFeed, in a craven effort at self-promotion, to venture forth with some of the salacious dossier claims. CNN then piggy-backed off BuzzFeed’s release and ran its own story referencing the dossier in an attack piece designed to further the Leftmedia’s effort to delegitimize Trump.

Big picture: The idea that nations like China and Russia don’t have secret information on America’s government leaders is simply naïve. You can bet that U.S. intelligence has all kinds of classified information on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jingping, as well. Remember the rather embarrassing story of the U.S. having bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone? It was only embarrassing because it became public that the U.S. was spying on an ally, but this is what intelligence agencies do. But this Russian dossier was generated by Trump’s domestic political opponents, not a foreign government.

With the Internet, the world of espionage has changed — primarily because there’s now an easy means of disseminating damaging information or misinformation on a massive scale. With the existence of organizations like WikiLeaks, various government and non-government actors can release classified intel to the public and yet maintain anonymity. That’s why a healthy amount of skepticism and diligent fact-checking must be applied by any news media organization, as there is often more going on than what meets the eye. This is precisely what CNN and BuzzFeed did not do — knowing fully that once they had released the fake news, that news would eclipse their abject lack of journalistic standards. Another case of unmitigated Trump Derangement Syndrome, but no doubt the dossier will fuel collusion and conspiracy theories in the coming months.

(Edited.)