A sign for The New York Times hangs above the entrance to its building in New York, May 6, 2021.

Photo: Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

I’ve been wondering when our media, at least those with a long-term hope of authority, would begin clawing back from their Russia collusion disgrace. The answer turns out to be: “When Vladimir Putin starts World War III in Ukraine.”

Russia and China are coming together now not because of oil and gas but because they have a common enemy, the democratic idea. I’m not being pious here. The only real threat either nuclear-armed regime faces is from its own people in a Tiananmen-style uprising. Russia is openly fascist, China is becoming so. A third giant power on the Eurasian continent, India, is at risk of evolving in the same direction.

This is our world. Overnight, we find ourselves in a full-scale economic war against a nuclear-armed petro-state, with the unspoken goal of regime change. Joe Biden, steeped in NATO and Cold War deterrence, has been handy in the moment but we are going to need a new foreign-policy elite, trained in new imperatives, for a new era.

So we come to the New York Times. The paper, which aspires to be nation’s and even the world’s “newspaper of record,” has chosen this moment to rectify its own record on the Hunter Biden laptop.

Critics understandably chortle but the paper perhaps is resurrecting itself for a serious moment. No “news” triggered its surprise acknowledgment of the laptop’s existence; its revisiting of the younger Mr. Biden’s seamy history was not driven by events. Instead, the need was for the Times to redeem itself from its participation in 2020’s craven spectacle, when top-drawer news organizations suppressed the news and even tried to convince readers that something wasn’t true that they knew was true.

The laptop story, broken by the New York Post, was everything the Russia collusion story wasn’t: meticulous, transparent, on-the-record sourcing; contemporaneous, documentary evidence that doesn’t depend on a source’s after-the-fact recollection or spin.

A paper of record has one job, to let its readers know what’s true and what isn’t. The Times abdicated, and whether the motive was partisanship or simple Twitter cowardice is irrelevant. The media failure that culminated in so much Russia-related folly in the Trump era was cumulative, as former British government adviser Dominic Cummings recently noted: “It both ignored many awful aspects of the Putin mafia state for 20 years and invented nonsense about it” (emphasis in the original).

Mr. Putin makes his plans according to his assessment of America’s enduring foreign-policy elite, not a passing wild card as Donald Trump would have seemed to him.

As tasteless as the Trump-Zelensky phone call may have been, in Hunter Biden’s activities while his father was leading U.S. Ukraine policy Mr. Putin would have seen the kind of oligarchic corruption he could recognize.

In the circling of the wagons around Mr. Biden by the media and its intelligence sources, in their premeditated lying that the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” he would have seen the same “political technology” he uses on Russian voters at home.

You may think, as I do, that Mr. Trump subordinates every consideration to flogging an image of himself as the world’s greatest winner in a world of losers. But the plain truth is, however you explain it, Mr. Putin paused his Ukraine Anschluss during the Trump presidency. Perhaps a piece of the puzzle is the Washington Post’s account this week of Mr. Biden’s failed effort in 2014 to convince Barack Obama to send antitank weapons to Ukraine. Alas, the week saw also a gratingly stupid article in the Los Angeles Times suggesting Mr. Trump somehow caused Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine.

We’re going to need better than this from our press.

Joe Ferullo, a former

CBS and NBC news executive, writes hopefully in the Hill of a new era in cable news in which “resentment and resistance are pushed to the side and straight news steps back into the spotlight.”

He invests perhaps more hope than is warranted in ambivalent words from the new corporate master of CNN. We’ll see. Suddenly, at least, the New York Times wants to grow up, as if the events of the past three weeks merit a rediscovery of seriousness of purpose.

An unfinished bit of business here is the U.S. intelligence establishment—the one whose behavior Mr. Putin has actually been betting on, the one that deliberately gaslighted U.S. voters in 2020. Five years ago I wrote that instead of a fake collusion Watergate, we needed a real Pentagon Papers-type scandal to expose the “awkward, contradictory and humiliating straddles that Western governments have engaged in concerning the rise of the Putin regime.”

We still need this. It will be painful but necessary as our society and foreign-policy elite adapt to the new world being born as result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.