Two more news outlets had been told of fake Menendez claims, but rejected the story

Who peddled the story, and why was Tucker Carlson's site the only one that bought it? It looks like the manufactured story of Sen. Bob Menendez supposedly visiting Dominican Republic prostitutes was shopped around quite a bit before finally finding a willing patsy in Tucker Carlson and his conservative Daily Caller site. We know ABC News declined the story, finding it suspicious; now we know of two more outlets who were contacted with the same allegations:

The New York Post's Josh Margolin and Newark-based Star-Ledger's Ted Sherman were each contacted last summer with the claims that Menendez had sex with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic and investigated them, according to sources familiar with the matter. Neither reporter found enough credible evidence to publish a story based on the claims.

Whomever approached Margolin and Sherman knew what they were doing, given the reporters' experience covering political corruption in the Garden State.

"Whomever?" That's the infuriating part here. Presumably all these reporters know who was peddling this fake story, or at least who they were using as surrogates, and having someone peddling a now known to be fake tape smearing a well-known politician would seem to be a story in itself. So far, though, none of the reporters are talking. While it seems admirable to protect even sources who come forward with an unprovable story, protecting sources now known to have been pushing a fraudulent story is a different thing. ABC only said that "Republican operatives" assisted them in securing interviews with the women, but nobody involved will identify those operatives.

What's going on here? I find it a bit difficult to believe that the entire national media juggernaut can't figure out who was trying to sell them on fake evidence against a sitting senator, and just as difficult to believe that none of them would consider such a smear being assisted by "Republican operatives" to be a story in itself. Surely, we haven't gone over to the O'Keefe side of things so thoroughly that even ABC News and other outlets consider fake tapes to be no big deal. (Disclaimer: All right, the New York Post is a rag, I'll give you that one. They're already only a half-step removed from Bat Boy sightings. Maybe we're expecting too much there.)

I'm going to presume that there's discussions going on behind the scenes on how to report what happened in the smear and who, politically, was behind that. I'm going to assume that, because if we pass this whole episode by without the public ever being informed which "Republican operatives" were keen on selling this thing, I don't know how any of the involved reporters could ever expect to have their journalism taken seriously again.