Many Americans are clamoring for national news organizations to deliver the truth without the proverbial “fear or favor.” They’re fed up with big networks and other so-called “legacy media” failing in that mission. Now, through the Media Fail Awards, a project of my podcast They Stand Corrected, people are voting for the worst media failures of the year — and it’s a sadly tough competition.
One nominee is a network that chose not to fact check candidates at the disastrous debate in Atlanta between President Joe Biden and now-President-elect Donald Trump, even as Trump spewed extreme, nonsensical lies. Another nominee is a network that ran what it called a “fact check” but was the exact opposite of what’s true, vilifying Israel. A third nominee, once considered the nation’s “newspaper of record,” acknowledged to me that it refuses to correct some things that are wrong. A fourth is a news agency that publicly condemned its own anchor for attempting to do actual journalism.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The list of “epic fails” goes on, with examples so extreme that they should be studied in journalism schools for decades. If only they were surprising. Instead, they have become commonplace.
Since I launched They Stand Corrected and its accompanying newsletter earlier this year, I’ve been inundated with requests from listeners to fact-check reports from all the big national outlets. Many of these requests are like calls coming from “inside the house.” Reporters, editors, producers and others reach out confidentially, asking me to highlight their employers’ journalistic fiascoes. Their bosses won’t listen to complaints internally, so they’re effectively becoming whistleblowers.
Facing a daily onslaught of deepfakes and “alternative facts,” people desperately need trustworthy sources of information. The news media should serve that role, focusing at all times on truth. As I explain on the show, truth requires two things: facts plus context.
I spent two decades with NPR and CNN, where I was an on-air fact checker and tried to chip away at the onslaught of lies a little at a time. But that kind of work should not be an exception; it should be the rule. It’s what journalism should focus on primarily. Instead, driven by a desperate desire for eyes, ears and clicks, national news agencies have been churning out headlines, hot takes and “open mic nights” for people with uninformed “opinions.”
In recent years, this failure has bifurcated. Right-wing networks and websites have largely been overtaken by lies supporting far-right movements. But so-called “mainstream” outlets have also been overtaken by lies supporting far-left movements. The clearest evidence is the bigoted coverage of Israel, which is leading the global fight against Islamist terrorism.
Some episodes of They Stand Corrected have focused on rules inside these news agencies that institutionalize anti-Israel bias. Listeners told me that they were skeptical this is the case — until they listened and realized that standards and practices enforcing this bias have been clear all along. Convincing people to see antidemocratic Islamist governments as a “good guy” and the only tiny democracy in the Middle East as a Jewish “bad guy” is as antidemocratic as it gets.
Right-wing and mainstream news organizations go after each other, but fail to clean up their own messes. Take the CNN anchor who called Fox News a “B.S. factory” — without using the initialism. That would be fine if CNN weren’t also spewing bonkers lies straight out of the playbook of Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organization bent on slaughtering civilians.
The movements that led to the insurrection at the Capitol nearly four years ago and the violent “protests” on college campuses are, in fact, very similar. They’re ideological efforts laying the groundwork for fascism to take root — whether a far-right Christian nationalist version or an Islamist version. And each of these efforts is helped by the media.
Fortunately, most Americans oppose both of these extremes. And they’re increasingly left with nowhere to turn. Listeners tell me all the time that they’re fed up with big media.
It’s time for those news agencies to evict people who have infiltrated their operations to push antidemocratic agendas. It’s time to ensure that everything they put out, across all platforms, has been thoroughly fact checked. It’s time to commit to what New York Times owner Adolph Ochs called for in 1896: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” Perhaps ironically, the Times is itself a leading contender for two categories in the Media Fail Awards.
The message of these awards is clear: It’s a dishonor just to be nominated. Let this be a wake-up call.
Josh Levs, a frequent contributor to AJC Opinion, is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
About the Author
