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?

We’re thrilled to announce that Ali Watkins of Politico is joining the Washington Bureau as a national security reporter.

Ali, who covers intelligence and national security for Politico, has had a series of important scoops. She broke news that Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, met with a Russian spy in 2013. She also had exclusive new details on China’s harassment of American spies. Last month, she was the first to reveal the name of the Russian woman, Olga Vinogradova, who met with the former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos during the 2016 campaign.

Ali arrived in Washington in 2013 as an intern covering national security for McClatchy, where she was part of a Pulitzer-finalist team that uncovered the C.I.A.’s spying on Senate Intelligence Committee computers.

After McClatchy, Ali covered national security for The Huffington Post and then Buzzfeed before going to Politico.
— New York Times, 12/5/17

Ever since the Harvey Weinstein saga broke, we’ve argued that some women were willing to cozy up to a pig in order to have a shot at a lucrative career in Hollywood. However, you’re only as good as your professional talent and when some of the careers didn’t blossom as desired, many of these women are now screaming rape.

The template’s not been thrown out the window altogether….

What is known today is that in December 2013, the Temple University intern had begun a romantic relationship with James A. Wolfe, a man 30 years her senior. He happened to sit amid a flow of juicy information as director of security for the same Senate committee. The reporter-source romance would last four years. Then the FBI intervened.

From McClatchy, she went on to land jobs in quick succession at HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Politico and finally the New York Times, where she resides today at the Washington bureau.
— Washington Times, 6/9/18

That’s not to say everyone in high-profile journalism screwed their way to the top, but many did, and it prompted us to do some digging on their qualifications to occupy the most prominent positions in the profession; qualifications that can legitimately be questioned.

In most professions, one needs to at least have an educational background, if not a degree, in that chosen profession. However that doesn’t seem to apply to those who work in the highest seats of broadcast journalism.

For some, nepotism and/or sexual favoritism didn’t hurt either.
— On-Air ‘Journalists’ Are Lib-Trained, Poli-Sci Hacks

Of course, this is not to imply that ALL women, especially now millennial women who occupy a growing number of very influential positions in the media and in-and-around Capitol Hill, screwed their way to jobs that they’re relatively inexperienced to have acquired. It does show lazy journalism on Ali Watkins’ part as she found a shortcut to doing her job instead of that “shoe leather” journalism; a shortcut she was rewarded for.

Worked out for some people, and for Ali, once was not enough.

The New York Times published a damaging feature about its own reporter, revealing new details of Ali Watkins’ affair with former Senate Intelligence Committee aide James A. Wolfe.

“Last fall, after Ms. Watkins and Mr. Wolfe had broken up and while she was still reporting on the intelligence committee for Politico, she briefly dated another staff member at the committee, friends said. That relationship, which has not been previously reported, ended when the two decided not to pursue something more serious,” the Times wrote.
— Fox News, 6/25/18

“Dated”…? Fucked.

Will we see Ali Watkins being stripped of her co-Pulitzer Prize as quickly as Bill Cosby was of his many recognitions? Probably not because women are always the victim. She simply did what she had to do in a man’s profession, even though the numbers are narrowing.

And like a federal government agency, Watkins was not fired for wrongdoing but… reassigned.

The New York Times demoted a reporter who acknowledged a romantic relationship with a Senate staffer who is suspected of leaking information to journalists. Times editor Dean Baquet said Tuesday he would reassign the reporter, Ali Watkins from the paper’s Washington bureau to New York in the wake of revelations that she had been involved with James Wolfe, the former head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee. Watkins covered the committee for a number of publications, although not the Times.

In a staff memo on Tuesday, Baquet said Watkins would be reassigned to an unspecified position in New York “where she will be closely supervised and have a senior mentor.”
— New York Times “Style” section, 7/3/18

Thanks to Ms. Watkins, all women (especially younger women) will be looked at with that “What did she do to get there?” There was a time when you had to pay dues that required years, if not decades of hard work, to get the attention of the big house on the hill. If you’re a young woman, no matter how much she’ll commiserate with the #MeToo screamers, all it takes is spread your legs.

There are takers and rewards.