Mainstream media errors in the Trump era: Your catalogue of the media's bias-fueled failure-fest

The Washington Examiner ^ | December 31, 2017 | Becket Adams

[jiggyboy]

The press' credibility problem took a turn for the worse this year.

Chalk it up to bias, sloppiness, or sheer panic in response to the election of Donald Trump, but the bottom line for 2017 is that there was a shocking decline in the quality and reliability of political journalism.

Instead of adjusting adeptly to Trump's easy relationship with the truth and his tendency to abuse members of the news media, a significant number of political journalists and commentators tripped over themselves to repeat every bit of gossip, thinly sourced claim and half-cocked rumor.

These stories fell short of the most basic function of political journalism in that they failed to provide readers with a clear and indisputably accurate picture of what is really going on at the White House and Congress. These botched reports also further diminished the public's already dwindling trust in the press.

This isn't to say all coverage of the Trump administration was trash. Rather, it's to say an unusually large number of 2017 stories, tweets and headlines turned out either to be overhyped, inconclusive, misleading, half-true, or flat-out false.

Starting in order of most recent, here is our catalogue of the shoddiest political reporting beginning Jan. 20, 2017:

[jiggyboy]

One-stop shopping for all the media pratfalls of the year. You know the one about overfeeding fish in Japan is here too.

[PGR88]

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news.

Walter Lippman 1919

[aquila48]

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