Why Believe Media Declarations When They’re Too Often Wrong?

Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier had a polite, yet contentious conversation with Donald Trump, among other things, over the 2020 election result.

Former President Trump and Fox News anchor Bret Baier argued over Trump’s false claims of a rigged election in 2020 during a contentious interview that aired Monday on the network.

“First of all, I won in 2020 by a lot,” Trump said when Baier asked him how he plans to appeal to independent voters in 2024. “You know that’s not what … ” Baier interjected as Trump talked over him.

The former president floated unfounded theories about ballot harvesting and voter fraud, to which Baier pushed back, saying, “Mr. President that’s all been looked into. You lost the 2020 election,” Baier told Trump, noting the numerous recounts and lawsuits that followed Trump’s refusal to admit defeat in the weeks after the election.
The Hill, 6/19/23

The Founding Fathers gave the media protection in the First Amendment of the Constitution with the caveat that they keep the public informed. It didn’t have to be said that the information presented be accurate. Maybe it should’ve been. Especially over the last decade, the media has made numerous declarations and a good portion of the populace believed them. As usual, when those declarations turned out to be untrue, corrections are buried if issued at all. Apologies? Zip, zero, nada.

Does CNN ever apologize for getting it wrong — putting out false or deliberately misleading information — again and again and again and again and again?

No, CNN simply pretends all of this failure derives from good-faith errors rather than wishcasting and flamboyantly obvious partisan hackery, then dials the whataboutism up to 11.
New York Post, 10/12/21

The lack of contrition is expected because some of the overpaid in the media risk loss of their income should the public not trust them. Brian Williams seems to be one of the exceptions of a busted liar who continues to get high paying gigs while a laughing stock. But the media gets it wrong so often, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to insist the public accept them at their word, for example, when it comes to the 2020 election as the “most secure in history“.

In fact, the media is wrong so often, there are posts dedicated to not letting the arrogant off the hook so easily.

There is a major source of misinformation that’s rarely mentioned in news stories — the news media themselves. A Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism study found that “news organizations play a major role in propagating hoaxes, false claims, questionable rumors, and dubious viral content.”  In another study, Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts examined four million online messages transmitted or shared during the 2016 election campaign, including those from the websites of traditional news outlets like the New York Times and fake news sites like those of Russian operatives. The research team expected the Russian effort to be a major source of disinformation, and it was. But they discovered that traditional media were a larger contributor.
The Journalist’s Resource, 10/27/20

Clutch pearls now.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s greatest hits breakdown of media mistakes, lies, whatever you wish….

Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story

Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)

Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)

CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)

Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)

Russia Attacked U.S. “Diplomats” (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)

Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)

A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)

You get the drift, but wait, there’s a lot more!

Not fake news, just plain wrong: Top media corrections of 2017
The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news
My Top 10 media lies: Micheal Goodwin

How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?
20 Stories The Media Got Horribly Wrong In 2020
The mainstream media’s top 10 missteps in 2021
Trump was just arraigned on federal charges. The media are already getting it wrong
Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?
New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

You may find ironic and humorous when some of the gross offenders offer sanctimonious introspection only after all harm was done.

And probably the biggest middle finger-mocking of the media and Joe Biden they are protecting, resulted in the slogan-turned-hashtag, found on social media sites and auto bumpers to this day….

NBC NASCAR reporter Kelli Stavast is either hard of hearing, or a very, very quick thinker.
Deadline, 10/3/21

It’s best not to believe any media story nowadays. They’ve clearly earned the mistrust.

Sadly, they also depend on their consumers being too lazy to do the due diligence and investigate further on their own, which unfortunately explains how easy it is to continue to include “The View” under the ABC News banner.

But when the media insists you believe masks work and vaccines are safe, climate catastrophes a century from now can be prevented today, elections where Democrats win should always be accepted, and especially when they insist you believe them because they say so, have one word at the ready…

Why?