If one mistake tarnished reputation forever then after Iraq war none of CNN, Fox, NYT, MSNBC, WaPo should be in business, specially since all of these were accomplices in and not victims of falsehoods.
Oh please. As if the reputation of any news outlet even matters anymore. They all fired their real journalists and fact checkers long ago. Everything you read is full of inaccuracies, agenda pushing and misinformation. If you think it doesn’t, you’ve been had.
All sides of mainstream media are worthless in my book. Mainstream media is a net negative on society, and it's especially shown now with media trust at record lows.
This isn't just one company or one side of partisan MSM. NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq repeatedly, WaPo lied about a Russian hack of critical US power infrastructure and CNN struggles to tell the truth when telling you the time of day.
It wasn't like they learned their lesson, either. They've continued to staff up with morons and to report a lot of falsehoods and distractions in the years since the Iraq War days.
Remember when Washington Post lied about Russians hacking a US power plant to sabre rattle for war? How about when the New York Times lied about WMDs which led to tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq and trillions of dollars wasted?
The news should be avoided because news websites are ideological war drums controlled by billionaires with agendas to push. These websites have led to direct harm. The New York Times is smeared with the blood of Iraqi civilians.
They don't even reflect the country or area they represent.
Supposedly "neutral" websites like AP and NPR routinely lie and smear facts to the slant of their journalists, as well. Politifact and other "fact checking" organizations are a laughing stock because of extreme bias.
Here's what I keep coming back to: when Dan Rather was hoodwinked into pushing a fake story about GWB's minimal military service, he was fired. When Keith Olbermann was similarly caught pushing a story he found and liked that turned out to be false, he was fired. When Brian Williams made up a BS story about an RPG firing at his chopper, be was suspended for 6 months.
What happens when Breitbart or HuffPo or various YouTubers and bloggers get caught in a lie? Nothing. Nobody's head is put in the noose.
News aggregators are to journalism what AliExpress is to shopping - they'll give you what you wanted at the price you wanted, but piled high with lies and crappy quality, and you'll never find the same company twice so their reputation doesn't matter.
All the same journalists who pushed for the Iraq war on false intelligence are still there at their jobs doing the same crap. There are zero consequences when "mainstream" journalists push fake news.
Another big one was The New York Times and Judith Miller uncritically parroting Bush administration lies about Saddam Hussein making nuclear weapons. It became so flagrantly bullshit that the New York Times actually apologized for it a year or two later, but by then it was too late.
I still read The New York Times, but I do so knowing they have an American establishment bias and will make themselves uncritical puppets of the government whenever they feel so inclined. Probably most of what they publish is usually more true than false, but you've always got to read it with a grain of salt. The newspaper is best as a bellwether for what the American establishment wants the American public to believe. Having "faith" is precisely the wrong way to read a newspaper.
You mean like how every 'reputable' news outlet uncritically repeated the US's Iraq war propaganda for months and fired journalists who criticized it? Or do you mean people you don't like saying things on social media?
There's also the fact that the MSM has made complete asses of themselves over the last few years.
Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?
At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"
I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.
It doesn't matter if they correct it after they've already sold the lie. The damage is done and most people won't read the correction.
After 9/11, New York Times wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were. MSM just takes Bush/Obama admin + intelligence communities claims at face value. It is supposed to be their job to fact-check govt, but instead they are just a rubber stamp for govt propaganda. The only admin they have been capable of properly fact-checking is Trump admin and that's only because their corporate sponsors & donors are anti-Trump.
When the intelligence community makes a claim, media fact-checks that claim by asking the SAME intelligence community to verify.
If they aren't willing to put in the work to be trustworthy, there's no reason to give them any trust.
This is an association fallacy.
Every media outlet has an agenda, journalism has standards and you either point out the flaws or quit untrustworthiness allegations.
That misinformation comes in different flavors. The NYT's reporting on "WMD" to legitimize the Iraq Invasion is a stain on their reputation, but I still consider them to be "as reliable as one could hope for".
That vs. Fox News, which was designed from the start as arm of the GOP and is a fount of intentional misinformation.
I think the path forward is curated collections of sources with trusted reviewers.
Edit: defenders can question my assertion of intention regarding Fox News, but its origin and goals are indisputable:
Why is surprising that those organizations were duped though? Are people laboring under the assumption that reporters are smarter than everyone else? Because that’s definitely a mistake.
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