Last week, I predicted that the furor around Joe Wilson's “you lie” outburst will end badly.

The media was not only obsessing over the sideshow, forgoing yet another opportunity to actually inform the public about health care and the efforts to reform the insurance system. Even worse, they were all but ignoring the substance behind Wilson's claim, taking a pass on the question of whether Wilson was correct or not. (He wasn't.)

The media was not only allowing Wilson's outburst to divert the entire health care debate to a discussion of the relatively small matter of how, if at all, health care reform would treat people who are in the country illegally, they were repeating his false claim over and over without indicating its falsity.

That behavior has continued. And, incredibly, reporters actually praise news reports that fail to examine the question of whether Wilson was telling the truth. Take this Washington Post news report today: 1,300 words, not one of them indicating whether Wilson was right or wrong. 1,300 words, and it omits a central -- perhaps the central -- fact of the controversy: Wilson was wrong. And Politco's Jonathan Martin praises it as a “good story.”

This will not end well.