Public Trust in Media Dies in ‘Groupthink’
You can’t gain public trust when it’s obvious you don’t trust the public to vote “the right way.”
Journalists are terrible at hiding their desire to run our democracy, using their platforms to direct history to the “right side.” That badly disguised lust for power creates an audience problem, where the people resent the media’s imperious lectures about which side they are supposed to favor — and if they don’t, they are uneducated, racist nincompoops.
Axios.com co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen appeared on the podcast “Honestly with Bari Weiss.” The host left The New York Times editorial page staff as it bubbled over in wokeness in 2020. She asked her guests what caused the collapse in public trust in the media.
VandeHei blamed three happenings for the problem:
The ascent of Twitter showed reporters were engaged in a “hotbed of liberal groupthink,” and reporters clearly stated which side they were on. He oddly argued before Twitter, reporters were objective, and their opinions “they hid from the public.”
In 2020, the coverage of COVID, “defund the police,” and the “word policing” didn’t sit right with Americans.
The final straw was the coverage of President Joe Biden, where the public clearly saw his decline, but there wasn’t a lot of coverage of that. The media lectured that this issue was all “cheapfakes.”
VandeHei then claimed that this problem was somehow caused by only a few people! He announced he is a fierce defender of journalism, and “I believe that most reporters at most institutions actually do try to get to the closest approximation of the truth and achieve it most of the time. I think it’s a couple of bad apples who make it look bad for everyone.”
That inevitably undercuts numbers 1, 2 and 3. The media’s arrogance isn’t limited to two or three “bad apples.” They are unified in a broadly national and overtly hostile mindset.
These three are certainly factors, but the voters who are old enough to rely today on traditional media outlets know it goes back further than that. Contrary to VandeHei’s imagination, reporters openly demonstrated an infatuation with Bill Clinton in 1992, insisting he was a more talented candidate than JFK. Then they descended even deeper into “thrill up my leg” adoration for Barack Obama in 2008.
Weiss told her guests they should start in 2016, where the election of Trump caused crying fits in the newsroom and spurred the national newspapers to present themselves as crusaders, because “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But it’s the combination of the overt adoration of Obama and the attempted evisceration of Trump that sunk trust in the media.
When Weiss returned to the cover-up of Biden’s mental decline, Allen blamed the groupthink: “People discounted what they saw with their own eyes … you don’t want to be separate … the herd wanted the approval of the White House … they didn’t want to look like they were being ideological.”
Isn’t it strange that these self-appointed heroes who think they embody democracy are a herd who deny reality because they “wanted the approval of the White House”? Today’s “news judgment” is very crude when it’s considered “ideological” to pursue an obvious storyline because it might help Trump.
The legacy media today aren’t “fact-based.” They are results-oriented. Public trust would seem to go hand in hand with the media letting go of their overweening desire to control the results. You can’t gain public trust when it’s obvious you don’t trust the public to vote “the right way.”
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