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I didn't trust them long before this. They have given me no reason to trust them. The media's credibility has nosedived since 2015 when Trump became a threat , but even before it was bad. (link to my blog There is no reason to trust the mainstream media ) An obvious example being the Iraq War , such as the reporting of non-existent WMDs and chemical labs, which The Times has since apologized for being so wrong. In fairness, the conservative media was equally bad in this regard. Apologizing probably is not good enough, because the damage has already been done and they profited from it. The media just cares about turning hype and controversy into clicks, while innocent parties suffer the consequences of hoaxes and other bad reporting.
They certainly did this with Trump. Wapo, NTYs had an entire staff designated with going through every piece of minutia of his financial history and every person he associated with.
You cannot trust these people, and not just limited to the media. Anyone who is employed by think tanks or organizations can be dismissed for the smallest or imagined of transgressions like Jim DeMint in 2017 being fired from The Heritage foundation https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-heritage/conservative-u-s-think-tank-heritage-foundation-fires-leader-idUSKBN17Y2IH . David Shor comes to mind as an obvious example of this.
Yup.
It's not saying that you can't read what they right, or you can't take it into account. But frankly, anybody with any sort of actual position, no matter what that position is, happens to be facing loads of social, cultural and economic pressure in terms of their writing. People want to make it partisan...right? Act like only their opponents can be swayed by "audience capture", as an example. But nope. It all has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. No exceptions.
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My own personal... awakening? endarkening?- to American political media was a period in the early 2000s where CNN and such has a partisan distinction in how they reported political scandals on the talking head segment headers and intros. Generally, if a politician scandal was about a Republican, it would front-end 'Republican' or Name(R), where the party was obvious and in the framing. If it was a Democrat, however, the party affiliation was often buried into the body and not on the TV text, so things like 'Congressman in scandal' or 'Senator Name'.
There was also a (less consistent) trend of order of affiliation when bipartisan good or bad news occurred. If it was good news, Democrats and Republicans. Bad news was more often Republicans and Democrats. Democrats offered reforms, Republicans cuts or changes, etc.
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