The damage from the loss of trust in the MSM goes far beyond specific instances of “fake news”
As an example, the media omitted any mention of Peres criticizing “stupid Arabs” shortly before the election, lest it hurt him with Israeli Arab voters. Not so long afterward, when Court President Aharon Barak was a bit too candid in explaining that there were no Mizrachi judges on the Supreme Court because there were none qualified, the Israeli press declined to report it.
What was once an Israeli phenomenon — i.e., legitimation of the idea that the purpose of journalists is not to uncover the truth, but to suppress it in the pursuit of political ends — has now spread everywhere. The number of crucial and long-running stories on which the mainstream media (MSM) missed the boat entirely in pursuit of a partisan political agenda is a long one.
THE BREAKDOWN OF trust in the MSM in America can probably be traced to the 2004 resignation of longtime CBS news anchor Dan Rather, in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, after he highlighted and stoutly defended documents purporting to cast aspersions on President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard. These documents were shown to be forgeries.
Until the 2020 election was safely past, the MSM studiously ignored the Hunter Biden laptop, relying on a letter signed by 51 former senior intelligence officials that it bore the marks of a Russian information operation. This justification persisted despite the fact that the laptop was in the possession of the FBI and had already been authenticated.
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