Media credibility collapse: Readers must now decode and research the news

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Media credibility collapse: Readers must now decode and research the news

See if this sounds familiar: You read a report from a major news outlet and notice some odd language — say, about a mass shooter being a “woman in a dress,” or a “Maryland man” being inexplicably deported.

Seeking clarity, you read about the same issue in a different news outlet, only to find similarly ambiguous language. So you start examining primary sources to see what, if anything, has been left out of the stories you just read. You find yourself on YouTube or Facebook for some reason, watching videos that argue the current coverage is not just missing context but is intentionally misleading. Next thing you know, you find yourself on social media, talking directly with a domain expert who explains in painstaking detail everything that’s wrong with the news coverage.

It is only after all these steps that you finally get a sense of the facts of the story.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. Getting the news these days is basically a full-time job for the reader. It is no longer possible to understand what’s happening in the world by passively consuming the news and accepting at face value what the media tell you. That’s because the media coverage is not there to inform or educate you — it is there to make you you stop asking questions and inure you to falsehood and euphemism.

You must therefore act as your own forensic auditor, scrutinizing and even decoding published or broadcast reports to figure out what they really mean. You must cross-reference them with secondary or tertiary sources and seek alternative viewpoints to verify accuracy.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. An astonishing 94 percent of U.S. news consumers believe it is important for “people to do their own research to check the accuracy of the news they get,” according to recent Pew Research Center data.

In other words, nobody trusts us. And can you blame them?

Have you read about how you can lose weight on a chocolate diet? That story is based on a hoax study, cleverly pitched to newsrooms as part of a larger experiment to demonstrate how easily junk science spreads through news media.

When you’re done gaining a few pounds with your all-chocolate diet, ponder why immigration remains such a major political issue in the U.S., especially given that news outlets such as the Associated Press insisted in 2021, during the Biden administration, that journalists not use the word “crisis” to describe what was happening as millions poured over the U.S.-Mexico border.

Open your paper and read about the efforts to oppose “gender-affirming care.” The reporting doesn’t mention anything about chemical castration, puberty blockers, or the male dilation. With vanishingly rare exceptions, the news stories fail to mention all those double mastectomies being done to perfectly healthy young teenage girls.

This leaves you, the reader, with several unanswered questions, such as, “Why would anyone oppose something that sounds as benign as ‘gender-affirming care’?” and “Why are people suddenly losing malpractice lawsuits over this?”

Once you’ve finished thinking this over, please enjoy these stories explaining how COVID-19 isn’t all that serious — but that if it is, the Chinese Communists have it completely under control, and it’s nothing but conspiratorial nuttiness or even racism to suggest that it originated in the Chinese virus lab right where the first cases were detected.

While you’re here, perhaps you’d like to read about how Robert Mueller has the evidence against Trump — boy, oh boy, are the walls closing in now!

We have less than three years left to do something to solve climate change. Or was it 10 years? Or was it 11 years? It’s hard to say, especially given that that last prediction is from 37 years ago.

So, how did we end up in a situation where we can’t trust what we read? Partisan bias obviously played a large role, but that alone cannot explain the shoddiness of modern reporting or the Grand Canyon-sized credibility gap.

Perhaps another factor is that journalistic outlets, operating under increasingly tight budgetary constraints, have chosen to replace experienced but expensive veteran journalists with cheaper J-School Muppet Babies.

A 40- to 50-something-year-old biased journalist at least understands something about, say, parliamentary procedure. That cannot be said for the twenty-somethings crowding into newsrooms with a passion for advocacy journalism — “giving voice to the marginalized” — matched only by their passion for not knowing things. Ask yourself this: how many times have you recently seen the word “unprecedented” thrown around incorrectly in news reporting?

This poor version of journalism widens an already yawning credibility gap. As more readers and viewers tune out, news executives look to cut costs even further. Modern media is a snake eating its own tail.

Meanwhile, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect — author Michael Crichton’s theory of how the press enjoys unwarranted trust despite repeated failures — has stopped working. Where the news once separated fact from noise, the public now sees the news as the noise and feels a need to filter what is already supposed to be filtered. This is why millions have turned to alternative sources such as YouTube, Substack, and podcasts for news and analysis.

The public is no longer willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, because we don’t deserve it.

The death of expertise, as they say, wasn’t a murder. It was a suicide.

T. Becket Adams is a longtime journalist and media critic in Washington.

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