THE MEDIA ARE KILLING THEMSELVES WITH BOTCHED ANTI-TRUMP REPORTING
By David Harsanyi
December 15, 2017
Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media have botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.
Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations, written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing, turned out to be completely wrong.
Reuters, Bloomberg and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t.
ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t.
Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails before they were published. It had not.
Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.
If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?
Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception. Maybe newsrooms have too many people who view the world through an identical prism — which is to say they believe he stole the election with the help of Russians.
For instance, the CNN reporters who wrote the DNC story contend they had two sources who told them Donald Trump Jr. was offered encryption codes to look at hacked DNC emails. They both must have lied to them about the same date on the same e-mail. CNN says that the duo followed “editorial process” in reporting the piece. This brings three lines of questioning to mind.
First: Do news organizations typically run stories about documents they’ve never authenticated? Can they point to a single story about the Obama administration CNN has written using a similar process?
Second: Why would two independent sources lie about a date on the e-mail to Trump Jr. if they didn’t want to mislead the public? And how independent could they really be? How many stories regarding the Russian-collusion investigation has CNN run from these same sources?
Three: If sources lie to you, why not burn them? There may be good reasons to avoid exposing a dishonest source. Perhaps it will scare away legitimate whistleblowers. Perhaps reporters want to preserve relationships with those in power — because they may help on other stories in the future. At the end of the day, you’re in contest for information.
But these people have put the reporters’ reputation, even their jobs, in danger. Moreover, they have engaged in a serious abuse of the public trust and an abuse of power.
Who knows how many of these mistakes, spread over numerous outlets, came from the same sources? This seems newsworthy.
When honest mistakes are found, the reflex of many journalists has been portraying themselves as sentinels of free speech and democracy. Often they will attempt to do this by contrasting their track record on truth with that of Donald Trump. Yes, Trump is a fabulist. And maybe one day Robert Mueller will inform us that the administration colluded with Russia.
What it has not done up to this point, however, is undermine the ability of the press to report stories accurately. Trump didn’t make your activist source lie.
The fact that many political journalists (not all) have a political agenda is not new, but if they become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, they will soon lose credibility with an even bigger swath of the country. They will have themselves to blame.
I've included in the above articles and links many other liberal media outlets than the Washington Post. But that's precisely the point. While WP is biased, they are part of a brethren that are overwhelmingly liberal (at least 80% in every poll where reporters self-identify as "liberal" or "very liberal" for at least 50 years at a ratio of 80% or more, and only 7% identify as conservative. And that has increased in recent years, so that identifying as conservative in newsrooms could be a career-ender.
Likewise among those working in Hollywood movies and television entertainment, among teachers, and among university professors, that are similarly (and rabidly) 80 to 90% liberal.
As I've cited the statistical numbers for on many occasions.
