FARRELL: The News Industry’s Big Problem

From Chris Farrell’s Op-Ed for The Daily Caller:

The news industry knows it has a problem but won’t admit what it is. Here’s the short version: they lie a lot.

A new study by the Reuters Institute examining trust in the news found a disconnect between what trust means to media producers and media consumers. To reporters and editors, trust comes from transparency about how the news is made. But consumers want news to be relevant to their daily lives and factual. Yet several recent stories show how the press promotes the liberal narrative view of the world at the expense of the facts.

Take for example the “60 Minutes” hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. DeSantis’ more open, less hysterical approach to managing the crisis has earned him the ire of liberals who want to keep the country on permanent lockdown. But the attempt by “60 Minutes” to imply a corrupt bargain between DeSantis and Publix foods over vaccine distribution was so blatantly false that CNN judged it a “massive gift” to the governor going into his reelection campaign and the next presidential campaign season.

A new study by the Reuters Institute examining trust in the news found a disconnect between what trust means to media producers and media consumers. To reporters and editors, trust comes from transparency about how the news is made. But consumers want news to be relevant to their daily lives and factual. Yet several recent stories show how the press promotes the liberal narrative view of the world at the expense of the facts.

Take for example the “60 Minutes” hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. DeSantis’ more open, less hysterical approach to managing the crisis has earned him the ire of liberals who want to keep the country on permanent lockdown. But the attempt by “60 Minutes” to imply a corrupt bargain between DeSantis and Publix foods over vaccine distribution was so blatantly false that CNN judged it a “massive gift” to the governor going into his reelection campaign and the next presidential campaign season.

Last summer, the New York Times ran an explosive yet thinly-sourced story about Russia supposedly paying bounties to Afghan militants for every American service member they killed. This immediately became fodder for Trump critics, who claimed the president’s failure to adequately protest the bounties was somehow related to the wider Russia collusion hoax. Shaky logic, but when did that ever stop the Trump haters? Yet a Biden administration review found the bounty story lacked credibility. Add it to the massive list of bogus Trump/Russia headlines that broke breathlessly, then died quietly.

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