An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "Media Objectivity, 1920-2024, RIP," by John Fund.
In January 2019, every major media outlet in Washington seized on a BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump had ordered his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. The next day the story was firmly shot down by the prosecutors investigating Trump. Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s fiercely anti-Trump legal analyst, had to concede: “the larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it.”
Later, it was revealed that pretty much the entire basis of the “Russiagate” probe of allegations that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election had collapsed. Its central pillar—a dossier by a compromised former British spy Christopher Steele—had been covertly paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and relied on easily discredited sources.
Not only did the collapse of the Russiagate conspiracy theory not lead major media outlets to rethink their stance toward Trump and the truth, many reaped benefits from the story. In 2019, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded its National Reporting prize to The Washington Post and The New York Times for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest” of the imaginary Russiagate non-scandal.
You really can't hate them enough.
Coverage of Trump—both accurate and flawed—was also a bonanza of a business model for elite media outlets. Both executive editor Jill Abramson and her successor Dean Baquet boasted that Trump had been big box office for the Times. “Given its mostly liberal audience,” Abramson wrote in her memoir, “there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers.”
Indeed, the company’s stock price had hit a three-year low of $10.80 on November 3, 2016, five days before Trump’s election victory; when Trump left office in January 2021, the shares had reached $49.86, just shy of their all-time high. Former Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, who wrote a definitive, four-part, 24,000-word take-down of the Times’s sloppy coverage of Russiagate for the Columbia Journalism Review that appeared in early 2023, referred to the paper and Trump as “sparring partners with benefits.”
But like the addict who experiences a short-term high after taking narcotics and then crashes but can’t change his habits, the media is paying a long-term price for its farewell to objectivity. In 2018, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told a journalism conference at Oxford University that the news media seemed to be losing the power to influence events. “Journalism may not work as it did in the past,” Baron said. “Our work’s anticipated impact may not materialize.”
One factor is the loss of public trust and confidence. An October 2022 survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that only 34 percent of Americans trusted the mainstream media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” and that was only because 70 percent of Democrats took that stance. Only two weeks after Leonard Downie published his obituary of objectivity in The Washington Post, a February 2023 Gallup/Knight survey found an even grimmer picture. Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, fully half the respondents said they disagreed; only 25 percent agreed. Only 23 percent of those surveyed believed that journalists were acting in the public’s best interests. The Associated Press said the results “showed a depth of distrust and bad feeling that go beyond the foundations and processes of journalism.”
Can anything be done? Objectivity is unlikely to have a Lazarus-like resurrection from its grave anytime soon...
Article tags: ATCM, Donald Trump, John Fund
The legacy media plays solely to a niche audience of fellow travelers, eager for their dopamine hit of skewed left-wing bias and talking points. It is the only audience the legacy media has left. While outlets such as MSNBC and Washington Post proudly cite their progressive bias, other outlets such as CNN try to pass themselves off as objective reporters of "hard news" and end up alienating everyone. If it weren't for cable service carriage fees, CNN would have been bankrupted years ago.
We should move past the multi-generational discussion of media "bias" and simply conclude that the media is now a vehicle for regime propaganda in service of those who would censor anyone daring to hold views contrary to the regime. Today's Pravda.
"Only 23 percent of those surveyed believed that journalists were acting in the public’s best interests."
That's pretty vague - what exactly are the public's best interests? Even-handed and complete recounting of events, or curating the presentation to protect the tender skins of the audience? I suggest that the curating of events is viewed by many of those 23% as being in the public's best interests.
The effects of this are not going away any time soon. While those who run the media companies sometimes realize that they need to change in order to win back viewers, like CNN or the Washington Post, management changes don't automatically mean that the journalists themselves are going to change; they are the ones who are ideologically captured, and they keep pushing back against management because of this. Want change? They need to replace every reporter/journalist with people of integrity who strive for fairness in reporting, instead of editorializing or regurgitating one side's talking points. It could work if those in the media also got rid of their opinion panels and just stuck with reporting facts without bias. Of course, they won't do that. That would mean allowing people to judge for themselves, which would effectively cancel out the leftist nonsense currently plaguing them.