It’s been a rough week for journalism. Sure, you could find a story or two each week where a media outlet showed incredible bias or messed up a major story (usually due to bias), but this past week was especially embarrassing for the profession.
As Hurricane Florence bore down on the East Coast, news outlets rushed to blame President Donald Trump for the storm. The Washington Post editorial board wrote an article titled “Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit.” In it, they argued that Trump is “complicit” to extreme weather because he “plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.” Absolutely nothing Trump could have done in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricanes could have prevented Hurricane Florence.
MSNBC and CNN joined in blaming Trump for the hurricanes.
Next, the media and congress bungled a sexual assault claim against Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) received a letter in July claiming Kavanaugh had pinned down and attempted to remove the bathing suit of a female while they both were in high school. She only acknowledged it after the Kavanaugh hearings were completed and the media got wind of the letter. Once it was known, the media rushed to speculate on its contents — with rumors swirling about the sexual nature of the accusation.
Now the media is running with the 35-year-old accusations, instantly believing them simply because they were made against a Republican nominee, even though the allegations are thin and only surfaced during particularly opportune times.
The New York Times ran an article on Thursday implying in its headline and lead that Nikki Haley, ambassador to the U.N., was spending exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money on curtains. The article waited until the sixth paragraph to note that the decision to purchase the curtains was made during the Obama administration and Haley had no say in the matter. An editors’ note now sits atop the revised article.
This week is not starting off any better. It’s Monday and already we’re learning that a Washington Post article from two weeks ago now has a lengthy editors’ note suggesting its reporting – which claimed the Trump administration has increased the number of denials of passport applications from U.S. citizens on the Mexican border. Oddly enough it was actually the left-leaning Huffington Post that corrected the Post’s reporting, finding that the number of denials had actually dropped under Trump.
“The number of denials steadily dropped, from a peak of 1,465 in 2015 to 971 last year. As of last month, the State Department appeared to be on pace to end 2018 with still fewer denials than last year. The total rejections in these cases since Trump took office number fewer than 1,600 ― not thousands,” HuffPo reported.
And lest you think the major mistakes of the week only came from left-leaning outlets, some on the Right ran with the “Rate My Professor” reviews of a woman with a similar name as Kavanaugh’s accuser, but who was not his accuser.
Do better, media.