Politics

Bad Week For Media

Posted on by Tom

It’s been a really bad week for the media, with at least three different significant mistakes having to be corrected. It really undermines their position as the Fourth Estate.

  • Brian Ross was suspended from ABC News for a *massive* error on the Trump investigation.
  • Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal misreported a subpoena of Deutche Bank.
  • CNN misreported on Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks.

Those who have been paying attention for the last ten or fifteen years, as opposed to only the last year, are not at all surprised.

See, there’s a reason why “fake news” established itself in the minds of so many people so quickly: It’s because mainstream news has a very consistent habit of getting things wrong in the name of pushing stories out first. This record of inaccuracy began roughly the same time Internet news supplanted print media.

While I’d love to think that news reporting today is an overall pillar of integrity, I just don’t. I think the White House press corps is a joke. Every time I see a news story about the Trump administration, I think to myself, “I wonder if they are being fed misinformation? Are they doing anything to protect themselves from misinformation? How do they know their ‘high-level contacts’ are telling the truth? It would be so easy for the Trump administration to get people in the White House to simply lie to the press and feed them whatever they wanted to hear, which would ultimately destroy the media’s credibility and hurt America in the long run by eroding the power of the first amendment.”

Every news organization isn’t terrible, but most of them are. It’s why you have to really work to find individual journalists that you trust, not a network or media outlet.

Anyway, while I don’t necessarily believe Trump is trying to “destroy America,” he is clearly hell-bent on destroying the status quo, and part of that status quo is the media monopoly. The worrying problem is that I don’t believe Trump does or can know what will happen afterward. Every day I am reminded of Michael Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1985. With great intentions, Gorbachev utterly destroyed the status quo in the U.S.S.R. and the consequences still resonate to this day. There came a point (less than 6 years later) where he could no longer control the changes to his country. Now there is no more U.S.S.R. and a lot of people died in protests and civil unrest. There was an entire Bosnian War, which killed some 100,000 people and displaced 2.2 million other people.

Personally, I’d prefer that stuff like that didn’t happen in the U.S.

So hey, media, get your stories right. Stop making it easy for Trump. In one single week you’ve completely erased whatever progress you might have made in the last year.

Tom