Here’s Why Even Journalists Distrust Journalism These Days
Trust in news sources has been plummeting for a long time now, but recent events promise to make it sink it to new depths.
Let’s take the lab leak theory, which suggests the origin of COVID-19 was a Chinese laboratory, not a nearby wet market. After Sen. Tom Cotton mentioned the idea on Fox News last year, The Washington Post referred to his comments as a “debunked” “conspiracy theory.” The article has since been updated with a correction, which is more than the demagogues do when they mess up. But rather than fully copping to their mistake, they are now calling Cotton’s comments a “fringe theory.” As of three weeks ago, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight puts the odds of a lab leak being the culprit at 60 percent. Maybe Silver is part of the problem, too, but does anyone think of that as a “fringe” theory?
Or let’s take the now-debunked story about how, as NPR breathlessly declared, “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op.” Of course, you can’t blame them. This is how The New York Times sold it: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.” We now know that an Interior Department inspector general’s report found that this did not, in fact, happen. Sure, Trump still did and said lots of other horrible things (including aggressive rhetoric about wanting governors to use troops to “dominate the streets”), but protesters weren’t cleared just so he could hold that skeevy photo-op.