Can a campaign against disinformation itself be disinformation? That is the metaphysical question raised by President Obama’s latest crusade. Mr. Obama has been making the campus rounds, appearing at the University of Chicago two  weeks ago and at Stanford today to tell a tale of woe about the spread of fake news. To adapt the adage of media maven Marshall McLuhan: This is the wrong message and the wrong messenger.

Mr. Obama was brought back to the South Side of Chicago as keynote speaker at a conference organized by The Atlantic called, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” There, Mr. Obama opined: “It’s very difficult to get out of the reality that is constructed for us.” He should know. It’s an apt description of what Mr. Obama and the Democratic press have built. Forget the metaverse. This is an alternative reality.

Let’s start with the essay penned by the onetime media columnist for the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg, in 2016, when he mused that the Gray Lady should shy from objectivity — never mind that it was more honored in the breach — and toward what he called an “oppositional stance.” As Mr. Rutenberg put it, “balance has been on vacation” since Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy. 

Remarkably, this notion of balance going on holiday when it came to Mr. Trump was seconded by Mr. Rutenberg’s boss, executive editor Dean Baquet. In an interview, Mr. Baquet opined that Mr. Rutenberg “nailed” the paper’s thinking on the subject of Mr. Trump. Mr. Banquet went on to note that in respect of playing it down the middle, “Trump has ended that struggle.” 

Who can forget the sturm und drang of Russiagate, the false claim that Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with President Putin’s Russia, a story garlanded by nothing less than a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, shared by the Gray Lady and the Washington Post? This is all of a piece with Twitter shutting down the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and banning the New York Post from its servers. A year later, that story is still not fake.

It is not just the ink-stained wretches who have made their peace with disinformation when it obscures what they view as the wrong things and highlights the right ones. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is now under scrutiny by Special Counsel John Durham for its role in generating the “Steele dossier” and spurring the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surveillance of President Trump’s political operation. 

The notion that disinformation is a virus that threatens the health of the Republic appears to be overblown. A new study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management found that “very few people believe fake news” and that “the average citizen is well informed about big stories.” This hardly sounds like a natural crisis, and looks awfully like a manufactured one.    

At Stanford, Mr. Obama called himself “pretty close to a free speech absolutist.” We applaud the voicing of that commitment, but his concern that we are “losing the ability to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction” is a little bit rich. If that ability is atrophying, the blame belongs not to the bogeyman of “disinformation,” but to a press and politics that has said goodbye to the old standards.