“You do it to yourself/ you do/and that’s why it really hurts,” sings Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, on the single “Just,” which is the seventh track of the band’s 1995 critically-acclaimed album “The Bends.”

Exactly what Yorke might be talking about isn’t clear, and it’s precisely that ubiquity that makes the track not just a classic rock tune, but an easy entrance into all sorts of conversations about self-inflicted wounds — which is exactly what a new book — “Born Trump: Inside America’s first family” by Vanity Fair writer Emily Jane Fox — amounts to for American journalism.

Fox’s book, which has garnered widespread attention because of its purported salacious revelations about the lives and times of Trump’s older children, is less a black eye for the first family than it is for journalists covering the president.

That’s a shame, because it’s not fair to ascribe Fox’s failings to journalists and news outlets that have nothing to do with her work. But right or wrong, fair or unfair, that’s what’s bound to happen.

Marc Fisher, an editor for The Washington Post, aptly sums up the book’s shortcomings in one terse sentence:

“The core question about this book keeps elbowing its way past the smart conclusions: How does she know?”

As Fisher points out, Fox goes all-in with the salacious details: Ivanka Trump reportedly had a “dalliance” with cocaine; Donald Trump Jr. had a propensity for getting wasted and wetting other peoples’ beds in college; Eric Trump, in kindergarten, called a student-teacher a “ (expletive).”

The first question that might jump to mind here is “who cares?” And yes, that’s an entirely reasonable response.

But the bigger question is, what was Fox, a writer and reporter who has a duty to uphold American journalistic ethics, thinking?

Whether or not these reports sound plausible is beside the point. A complete lack of best practices — the book contains no notes on sources, no bibliography, and no evidence that Fox tried to fact-check anything with the Trump family — renders her reporting completely worthless.

Not just worthless, actively harmful. At a time when the president has called journalists “enemies of the American people,” Fox has blithely added ammunition to his campaign to discredit and sow distrust in venerable and trustworthy news organizations.

There’s no way for the Fourth Estate to police this kind of conduct, and we’re not saying there should be.

But it’s worth pointing out that all the hand-wringing over Trump’s “fake news” campaign might be time better-spent brushing up on basic tenants of journalistic ethics and considering the ramifications of irresponsible news-gathering and reporting on the industry as a whole.

Because charges of “fake news” aren’t going to go away until shoddy reporting does.