Truth Is Not the Goal

The most recent poll by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism showed that Americans have less confidence in their media than citizens of any of the 46 countries polled — 29 percent. (I’m not sure whether North Korea was included.)

Americans’ distrust of their media is well earned. Let’s just consider some of the major mainstream media foul-ups exposed in recent months. For over a year, suspicions that COVID-19 might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been ridiculed by leading mainstream media (MSM) outlets as “debunked conspiracy theories”; rated conclusively false by so-called “fact-checkers,” such as Politifact; and removed from major social media platforms, like Facebook.

For over a year, we have been assured by the MSM media that last June, then-president Donald Trump ordered Lafayette Park cleared of demonstrators with tear gas, to facilitate a photo-op of him holding a Bible in front of historic St. John’s Church. And since a New York Times article two days after the January 6 Capitol riots, we have all known that the mob bludgeoned Officer Brian Sicknick to death with a fire extinguisher. And if you never heard of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the emails it contained implicating his father, that is because the MSM determined that it was a product of Russian disinformation and Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post exposé.

On the other side of the political spectrum, in the netherworld of Trump sycophancy (although by no means all conservative media), one would never learn that then US attorney general William Barr informed his boss that all the film clips showing boxes full of ballots being brought to a ballot counting center in Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit) were hooey. Wayne County always counts ballots at a central location, and not at the precinct level. And for good measure, Barr pointed out that Trump did better in Wayne County in 2020 than he did in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.