The splenetic Democrats at The Atlantic magazine love to paint themselves as Team Truth, while Trump "is an enemy of fact-based discourse," and "The guiding principle of Trumpism is 'Feelings don't care about your facts.'” So why on Earth would they publish Elizabeth Bruenig's made-up story of a mother learning her child would die of measles? Twitchy pointed out The Washington Post softened the fakery that "some feel deceived." Feel deceived? It was literally Fake News.  The Atlantic’s essay about measles was gut-wrenching. Some readers feel deceived. Some critics and physicians said Elizabeth Bruenig’s second-person account of a mother confronting a child’s death from measles felt misleading once they learned the story was reported fiction. Post media reporter Scott Nover began with Kelly McBride of the liberal Poynter Institute (who moonlights as a "Public Editor" at National Public Radio) was the one feeling deceived:  When Kelly McBride read Elizabeth Bruenig’s essay in The Atlantic about a child’s death from measles complications, she was moved and quickly shared the story on her Facebook account. She hadn’t realized that Bruenig’s family had been ravaged by the virus and the well-known journalist had lost a child. McBride, a media ethicist and senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, also didn’t realize the story was a hypothetical scenario — and the child a composite character based on the author’s research — until a friend alerted her to an editor’s note at the bottom of the story. Then, McBride felt duped. “I feel deceived,” McBride said. “I spent all weekend talking about this story to my friends as if the reporter had experienced it.” That was the extent of McBride's ethical evaluation in this article. Nover made the criticism very general: "Readers and media experts have condemned the story as breaching journalistic ethics by informing the reader that the story is fictionalized through a short editor’s note at the end of the 3,000-word essay." Nover then balanced it with The Atlantic defending its "reported fiction" as a "writerly device"! Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic, told The Washington Post in a statement that the magazine was “pleased that so many people are reading and praising Liz’s remarkable essay.” “We trust our readers to understand all different kinds of writing and writerly devices,” she said. “And while we included a note about Liz’s methods for transparency’s sake, we’re finding that most readers already understand the second-person well enough to know that the ‘you’ referenced throughout the piece is not literally ‘you,’ the reader.” Notice the lecture: we trust you to understand our crafty devices...if you're smart enough. Nover instructed the reader that "Reported hypotheticals have been used in other grim chronicles," and then came the praise for the fakery! Many readers, including physicians, praised the Atlantic essay, writing that its evocative writing and storytelling forced readers to grapple with the impact of vaccine hesitancy. “Read this while holding my almost-one-month-old, and it absolutely wrecked me. What a powerful and important piece,” one commenter wrote. “Tragically realistic story exquisitely described by Ms. Breunig,” wrote another. No. It was tragically fictional. Nover also brought in the Fake News writer to defend herself.  Bruenig, in an interview with the website Nieman Lab, defended the structure of her essay. “It is a hypothetical account of a very real phenomenon based on careful reporting,” she said. “I would place it somewhere on the creative nonfiction spectrum.” She said that she interviewed doctors for her piece, and based the character of the mother on herself. “I have no doubt that there are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the story or reject its premises, and they are entitled to their interpretations. I get it,” she said. "Entitled to their interpretations" that I made up a story. Feelings trumped facts.