I'm also a research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and I read (bits of) the US papers most days; I'm not just randomly speculating.

There are lots of things wrong with the US media. Institutional groupthink is definitively a thing. He-said-she-said reporting is also problematic and deeply embedded in US journalistic culture. Sub editing and before-publication fact checking of breaking news stories varies between fine and woeful.

Look. The New York Times and Washington Post have a liberal culture. They're written by well-paid mainly white guys, who live in Democratic cities. Their worldview is mainly establishment-progressive, notwithstanding their attempts to provide balance on the op-ed pages.

But given that, you should understand that they are fundamentally honest organisations. They try hard to get their stories right, they argue internally about the right thing to do, and they're prepared to take expensive and difficult stands on principle - e.g. protection of sources in court or publishing stories like the Pentagon Papers. Other news organizations with different cultural biases but high standards also exist - the WSJ and the Financial Times being two.

There is a massive difference between the NY Posts, Breitbarts, Daily Mails, and other people who are actively trying to sell you a pup, and news organisations which are flawed but honest. You do yourself and the world a disservice by lumping them in together.

The difference is only selection of stories to print. NYT/Post/Breitbart won't publish stories that go against their worldview and select stories that do. You aren't allowed to just make up stories in any of those orgs you mentioned but you can select what not to publish and what to sensationalize, and play political newspeak with copy such as rebels VS insurgents VS terrorists ect.

You absolutely can publish stuff which is known to be false in the Daily Mail, which is one reason it's a tendentious rag. I don't know enough about the NYP's attitudes to known falsehoods to know if that's true for them or not. I would be astonished if a politically useful and commercially popular story were spiked by Breitbart because the editors weren't sure it stood up. This is common even with papers like the Guardian, who are way less fastidious than the NYT and WP.

But sure, story selection is for sure a product of what a given outlet considers 'newsworthy', which has political bias (conscious or otherwise) baked in.

I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe these organizations are, overall, honest and caring about journalism. This is not to say there are not honest journalists involved, but overall these organizations fall to political interests or fighting for eyeballs and ad dollars.

During the summer of 2015 we had a bit of a "national tradgedy" shooting in my city of Charleston, the kind that consumes major news outlets for a week or two. Switching between the local paper and CNN (or Fox, or other national papers) was amazing to me, the difference so stark. It was clear the local journalists (I suppose disclaimer: I know a good number of them) were doing their absolute best to report the news, not sell papers. Those national, credible outlets were just trying to stir shit, ramp up the controversy. Anything to appear relevant and knowledgeable without actually being so.

> But given that, you should understand that they are fundamentally honest organisations.

An honest organization would not have printed the original article, it was far beyond an honest mistake.

OK, that's our point of departure. If the Post gets two officials telling them something then they're going to print that as 'officials say ...'. I agree that this often leads to bad journalism, but not that it's dishonest. You can of course have your own standards.

Yes indeed it is difficult when officials "tell" you something untrue, like two news releases that are very clearly about the same general topic but are not explicitly associated. In other words, it appears the 3 letter agencies were trying to imply something here, but not state it outright. It used to be (I think?) the job of the media to shine a light on government propaganda, not carry the ball for them.