Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise tried to make a statement about the way that we consume media in the social media age. For that, he’s reportedly been suspended from his job for a month. The lesson: no one is bigger than the medium.

Here’s the context. Yesterday, Wise decided to run a little experiment — tweeting three pieces of fake news, in the hopes that he could prove that someone would run them without fact checking, in some kind of attempt to either prove that real reporting is dead, or that blogs aren’t worth their salt, or both. Wise never claimed any sources in the tweets, but his notes were picked up and attributed to him in stories about the people in them. Wise then outed the tweets as fake on his radio show, and bragged about the boost in followers they provided. Then everyone called Wise out, while his editors at the Post laid the interoffice smackdown.

We noted Wise’s mea culpa in yesterday’s Go Home Already, but it was clear that this the scheme — since it gambled with chips obtained with equity in the reputation of the Post itself — was far beyond a simple apology. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk — who was one of the few national sources to republish Wise’s claim that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games — said that Wise “should be glad he wasn’t fired.”