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?

Nah, it had to be a right wing, white guy….

And whenever possible, it will be.

Seriously, the media culture is truly afraid of being targeted themselves which is why they have to be pulled, kicking and screaming, to state what may be the obvious. We’ve been told after previous incidents, Muslim terrorists liked to detonate one device that would drive panicked people towards another device that would be detonated to increase the carnage. That kinda’ made the possible perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing an easy speculation.

Of course, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and their left always declines to jump to conclusions that would lead to a nationwide backlash against Muslims; a backlash that very seldom happens.

People killed by radical Muslims on 9/11: 2,996
Muslim-Americans killed “in revenge”: 1
— The Religion of Peace

But who ever said the media could count if they wanted to?

Wow!

In 1987, President Reagan’s secretary of education, Bill Bennett, published a now classic New York Times op-ed titled “Our Greedy Colleges” in which he argued that the government’s attempts to make higher education more accessible may have also accidentally made it more expensive. “If anything,” he wrote, “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.” Ever since then, academics have sparred over whether the so-called Bennett hypothesis is really true. Do colleges actually take advantage of all those federal grants and loans by hiking their prices? And if so, are some schools even more callous about it than others?
— Slate, 9/8/15

It’s clear Weissmann is torn because he’d never envision liberal academics “taking advantage” of anyone, let alone the children, and even more horrifying is the possibility the hallowed halls of academia just may “callous”.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to speak to students at Roger Williams University and during the discussion of a host of issues, I said if I had the authority, I’d do away with all federally-funded student loans. You can imagine the sounds of gasps in lecture hall.

I explained my rationale to the students this way….

If you went to a car dealer, saw a vehicle you liked but found out it was too expensive, you’d leave and seek out another dealer that may have a similar model that fell within your budget. If enough people looked at that car and walked away, the dealer would be forced to lower the price in order to sell it.

HOWEVER, if you were to walk into that same dealer with a blank check from the federal government (trumpet fanfare!) and instead of buying that cheaper car, you could leave the lot with any car you wanted, just what do you think would happen to the price of all the cars on the lot? Once you inject the power of a government check that’ll cover whatever you choose, all bets are off.

Oh and by the way, it’s only a loan. You can leave the lot with that pricey car but you’ll still have to pay for it later and as it’s from this federal government, the whole notion of a “fixed” loan was never an option and they can up and take it out of your future earnings if they wish.

So, apply that concept to a college.

Aside from some brand new student centers and laptop giveaways, the value of the education is not worth the price. Students are, in some cases, forced to buy new reprints of books written decades ago. Math never changes. English evolves but not by a value of thousands of dollars, and the only thing really different are new, socially-oriented courses that do very little to enhance the value of a graduate to a future employer.

Women’s, Afro-American, environmental studies, etc., are fairly useless courses that keep some of our least productive, but “victimized” citizens employed as faculty. It makes the campus hierarchy and politicians happy, keeps students angry and active, and are ultimately a total rip off.

BUT, you get to pay for it with a federally-funded student loan with a higher-than-normal interest rate. Now you see why some of the Democrat presidential candidates are pushing for so-called “student loan forgiveness”. The rates are so high, the post-student income so inadequate for paying for that loan, poor parents have their entitled children moving back in with them, and let’s not forget one other fact that should damage the sense of youthful self-importance: they are WRONG about college.

Do you really think a college would try to find a way to admit them to their campus if they had no access to money? To be blunt, no college really gives a damn about a student until a check clears. They don’t care if the shit they put in kids’ heads leads to a meaningful career or not, and if they can jack up the tuition costs higher so tenured faculty can take even more sabbaticals and work even less than nine months out of the year, it’ll happen as long as students keep taking out those loans.

VIDEO UPDATE:

So before former students decide to whine about their college debt, remember, no one asked you to go to a college you couldn’t afford, no one asked you to accept a variable loan no homeowner would agree to without shopping around for more options.

Then again, we are living in a time where ignorance is an excuse and poor choices are forgiven so very expensive lessons never have to be learned.

Even in college.