Re:Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record
by throwaway894345 on Thursday October 07, 2021 @02:19PM
(#28790174)
I hear a lot of variations of "the media was never perfect", which is true in a strict sense, but dishonesty comes in degrees and that's what we're debating. In particular, while I did grow up with the media cheerleading the Iraq War, mostly that was just citing "intelligence sources". Now the media overtly lies about the contents of publicly available content (e.g., the Damore "Google Memo" or the Covington Catholic video) or it has a journalist wearing a gas mask standing in front of a burning police station with a "Mostly Peaceful Protest" caption underneath.
Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.
Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.
Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)