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It is notable that Democrat lies do not present the media a similar dilemma, given that we can observe them simply backing those lies to the hilt, unquestioningly, no matter how brazen.
The idea that the media is in any way interested in the truth is, at this late date, entirely unsupportable, and I am not comfortable allowing it to pass unchallenged. The media has now normalized rewriting their own archived output to match Democrat talking points in real-time. Large, well-coordinated lies from the Democrats last decades, result in obvious, devastating real-world outcomes, and generate zero accountability for those responsible. Truth was never a part of this process, and I do not believe that you or any of the other commenters decrying this issue are actually interested in the truth any more than the media is.
I think this is too huge a topic to litigate here but I do think journalists are pretty committed to technical truth-telling, and are moderated somewhat by norms of not being too shameless about their omissions. This immediately opposes them to Trump's different style of deceit.
How might we test this theory?
"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.
Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?
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