WHAT "NEWS" MEDIA?  As more and more information comes out about the record of news organizations in the last three years, the already low approval numbers for those outlets should sink even further.  From Just the News: 

It took The Washington Post fewer than 50 words to retract its 2020 attack on Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton's credibility for speculating that the COVID-19 virus emanated from a Chinese lab leak — a theory now deemed credible by the U.S. government. The words spoke volumes more, however, about the traditional media's record of failings during the era of former President Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic.

"Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus," the Post declared in an undated correction to a Feb. 20, 2020 article that accused Cotton of spreading a "fringe theory" that had been debunked as a conspiracy.

"The term 'debunked' and The Post's use of 'conspiracy theory' have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus," the outlet explained.

In other words, the Post admitted it drew its conclusions in a story and headline before the facts were clear enough to do so. This pattern has repeated itself far too often since Trump walked down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to launch a campaign that turned political convention, Washington elites and the news media upside down. 

Russia collusion was a Watergate-sized scandal, until it turned out to be a Democratic Party dirty trick. The Russians had bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, until they didn't. Natural immunity was inferior — and masks superior — in the fight against the coronavirus, until science determined otherwise. The Hunter Biden laptop discovery was Russian interference and election disinformation, until it became a verified source of evidence in the hands of the FBI, well before the 2020 campaign.

The accelerated unraveling of such stories from the mainstream media has taken a toll on the industry's credibility — only about a third of Americans in a Gallup poll trust the media regularly in what is a near-record low. It has, moreover, exposed an unhealthy alliance between government bureaucrats and liberal operatives, pushing storylines to willing recipients despite them being less than accurate, if not entirely untrue, experts said.

"This," said investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg, "was the media kind of proverbially gearing up for their fight where they say, 'OK, Trump is too far outside of the window of acceptable discourse, so we're gonna have to readjust the standards of journalism, recalibrate it, to meet this the threat.'"

The media "had deemed him a threat ... and that's where the journalistic standards are just tossed out," said Rindsberg, author of "The Gray Lady Winked," a book that exposed decades of failures inside The New York Times. 

There are some small signs the industry has taken stock of its loss of credibility. The Columbia Journalism Review — the industry's scholarly journal — recently published a four-part, 30,000-word series by Pulitzer-winning former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth exposing breathtaking failures of major journalism institutions.

Even Bob Woodward, the legendary, Pulitzer-winning Watergate journalist whose former partner Carl Bernstein fanned the early flames of Russia collusion, has repudiated his colleagues for taking as gospel the unverified Steele dossier, a product he has labeled "garbage."

Woodward suggested journalism "cheated" the public out of the truth on Russia and urged newsrooms to "walk down the painful road of introspection" with regard to their failures.

COMMENT:  Please read the whole thing.  This is the best summary of press failure that I've seen recently.  And while some journalists are finally admitting the extent of their disgrace, others go merrily along, ready to destroy Ron DeSantis if he dares run for president.

I'm afraid that, ultimately, we will need new news organizations because the current ones are beyond repair.  Their staffs are too often filled with ideologists who believe their mission in life is to save an evil, corrupt nation.  After all, look what they've too often been taught in school.

But where will we get new reporters and editors who want a corruption-free industry.  That is not an easy question.

March 4,  2023