"It’s certainly embarrassing for those who expressed concern or solidarity with Smollett to consider that we’ve likely been misled, our empathy for the actor misplaced."

"But don’t confuse your very reasonable embarrassment and anger in the wake of having been duped for a more permanent kind of harm. No one who invokes the name of Jussie Smollett to cast doubt on real victims would have believed them, but for this. Homophobes who regularly link gays to pedophilia or believe that same-sex marriage is a sign of civilization’s downfall weren’t on the brink of a change of heart, but for this. Neither were racists like U.S. Rep. Steve King, who believe that America won’t be America unless the majority of her population is white. People who believe these ugly things, and the much larger group who don’t believe anything except that it’s not their business to care, don’t seize on hoaxes because an isolated case proves they are right. They do it because they will use anything and everything to distract from the fact that they are wrong.... [T]here’s no larger message here, and we’re not all victims of his crime. Haters, proverbially, are going to hate. They did it before, and they won’t miss a step after this sad, weird story is done. We may get sick of hearing Jussie Smollett’s name repeated in lieu of an actual argument. But those of us who understand that one hoax doesn’t invalidate countless true stories of homophobic or race-based violence will not be deterred."

From "Why Jussie Smollett’s Alleged Hoax Won’t Change How Anyone Feels About Hate Crimes" by Evan Urquhart at Slate. The commenters at Slate are not buying Urquhart's spin. From the most up-voted comment:

I think the media is really trying to deny responsibility by pretending this is about hate crimes and not about the media. The issues is not hate crimes. It's how the media reports on alleged hate crimes. It's the fact that many in the mainstream and left-leaning media (the part of the media that concerns me, because it's the part I rely on for news) seem to be so ready and eager to believe the absolute worst about around half of the American voting public that they think fact-checking is unnecessary.

And the fact that nobody is willing to say, "Wow, maybe it is a problem that I am so ready and willing to believe the absolute worst about people who don't agree with me that it causes me to jump to wrong conclusions" is depressing.

Perhaps the lesson here should be that there *were* good reasons to doubt the story, other than being a racist homophobic bigot, and that if you believed otherwise — if you insisted that anybody who thought the story seemed fishy could only have been motivated by hate-think — that says something about you, not about anybody else.