Is it any wonder that nobody trusts the mainstream media any more?

 

NBC appears to have comprehensively shot itself in the foot (yet again) with its latest hit piece against Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.  It claimed, in so many words, that he had abused his second wife.  The article took eight paragraphs to lay out the allegations, made by Hegseth's former sister-in-law, described as "an anti-Trump far left Democrat".  It also acknowledged that the allegations were not spontaneous, but were in fact solicited by Democratic Senator Jack Reed, who opposes Hegseth's nomination.  Shades of the Kavanaugh nomination, anybody?

Only after all that, in the ninth paragraph of the report, did NBC admit that Hegseth's second wife had categorically denied all the allegations and referred the matter to her lawyers.

NBC aired all the allegations, painting Hegseth in the worst possible light, before admitting that the person he allegedly abused had said openly that he did not do so.  Fair and balanced reporting?  Not so much.  Political hit piece, slanted, biased and blatantly partisan?  You betcha.

This is just one example of what we've seen in the past few days.  Want another?  How about this headline in the New York Times?

How labeling cartels 'terrorists' could hurt the US economy

I think anyone who's had anything to do with terrorism (and, as I've mentioned before, I have years of experience in that field) will agree that the way the cartels behave is exactly like terrorism.  There's precious little difference in behavior between, say, Hamas in Gaza and the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.  Does the New York Times acknowledge that reality?  Like hell it does.  Instead, it tries to put the most negative spin it can think of on President Trump's executive order classifying the cartels as terrorist organizations.  It's not interested in the facts, only in propagandizing its readers with a one-sided partisan presentation of them.  "All the news that's fit to print" appears to have become "Only the propaganda we see fit to create".

I have no objection to any news organization espousing a particular viewpoint.  That's their right.  However, when they fail basic standards of honesty and fairness, and deliberately and with malice aforethought set out to deceive, shade the truth, and lie (which can be by omission as much as by commission), they take that altogether too far.  (And if you think that either of the articles linked above was not published "with malice aforethought", I have this bridge in Brooklyn, New York City that I'd like to sell you.  Cash only, please, and in small bills.)

I think the mainstream news media have already shut themselves out of the market for a great many Americans.  Witness the viewership figures for the Presidential inauguration last Monday.  The media trumpeted that viewership was down, implying that this reflected people's lack of engagement with President Trump.  What they failed to mention was the tens of millions of people who watched the inauguration on social media, vastly more than had ever done so before.  (I've seen reports that as many as 75 million users used social media to follow all or part of the proceedings, but of course I can't verify them.)  I was among those using social media in preference to the mainstream news media, and so, I think, were many of my readers here.

Few, if any, of us trust the mainstream media any more - and that's entirely their own fault.  They've brought it on themselves.  Can they win back that trust?  Not without an awful lot of hard work and demonstrated trustworthiness over an extended period.

Peter