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Journalists grapple with the media's role in losing the trust of the public

Jonah Goldberg
Stephen F. Hayes
Jon Ward

At a conference on disinformation held in Chicago, journalists grappled
on Thursday with the media’s role in losing the trust of the public.

“The mainstream media — sometimes I hate that term — did a lot of things
that led conservatives to think they're not going to treat us fairly,”
said Stephen Hayes, co-founder of the Dispatch, a right-leaning news
website launched in 2019, during a panel discussion at Disinformation
and the Erosion of Democracy, the conference hosted by the Atlantic
magazine and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

Hayes was a contributor at Fox News until late last year, when he and
his colleague Jonah Goldberg, another Dispatch co-founder, quit in
protest over the increasing radicalization of Fox opinion hosts like
Tucker Carlson. At the conference, Hayes again spoke about his
objections to Carlson’s “deeply, deeply irresponsible” programming. He
cited Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” program — which argued that the riot of
Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol was a “setup” meant to entrap
law-abiding Trump supporters — as what he considered the last straw that
prompted him to leave the network. (Yahoo News has published a thorough
examination of Carlson’s claims on that program, and the lack of
evidence for them.)

In separate appearances at the conference Thursday, Hayes and Goldberg
both spoke at length about how failures by the news media to treat
conservatives fairly — especially at key inflection points in American
politics — make the job of fighting disinformation much harder, because
they alienate many of the same Americans most vulnerable to lies and
manipulation by bad-faith actors.

“If you want to get to a place where we really understand the roots of
some of this, it's important that people say, ‘Hey, this is how roughly
half the country — the politically active types — see this, and this is
one of the reasons that explains why there's so much mistrust,'” Hayes said.

President Biden on a walkway on a plane with his son Hunter, in a mask,
carrying Beau.
President Biden, his son Hunter and grandson Beau board Air Force One in
March 2021. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Jim Rutenberg, a New York Times media columnist who moderated the panel
with Hayes, CNN’s Brian Stelter and Lauren Williams of Capital B, all
discussed a profound existential question concerning the status and
future of mainstream journalism.

“If our business is first and foremost about reflecting the world
accurately [and] if our likely readers ... don't trust us, then we can't
accomplish our job,” Rutenberg said.

Rutenberg also noted that the issue of how the media and big tech
companies handled the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 had been “a
theme running through” the day’s multiple conversations.

Goldberg, in an earlier panel, put the Hunter Biden laptop story into a
broader context. To prove his point about the media’s mistreatment of
conservatives, Goldberg recalled the Dan Rather “Memogate” scandal in
the fall of 2004. Rather, a veteran CBS News anchor, reported on
documents purporting to show that President George W. Bush had received
political favors to avoid getting drafted into combat service in
Vietnam. The documents were later shown to be inauthentic.

In retrospect, Goldberg said, that mistake helped reveal a pervasive
double standard on display in the media coverage of Hunter Biden’s
laptop, whose contents are alleged to have contained evidence of
potentially illegal business dealings. In the laptop case, the approach
used by the media and big tech was to be skeptical of a story that could
hurt a Democratic presidential candidate just before an election.
Equally, with Memogate, Rather and CBS News were insufficiently
skeptical of a story that could have boosted the support for a
Democratic presidential candidate just before an election.

“Have more conservatives in your editorial rooms,” Goldberg said when
asked what media institutions need to do better. “Dan Rather would not
have climbed up the jackass tree and fell down, hitting every branch on
the way, over the Memogate story, if they just had one person in the
room who didn't want that story to be true, right?”

“It was too good to check, and so everyone was all in on saying, ‘We've
got the story, we're going to nail George W. Bush,’” Goldberg said. “And
if you had just one person in the room who says, ‘I really don't want
this story to be true,’ and they'd asked painful questions, ‘60 Minutes’
wouldn't have done that.”

Goldberg also mentioned the media’s coverage of the allegations of
sexual assault made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“You had all sorts of people starting from the position that his
accusers were telling the truth, even though they could not verify any
of it,” Goldberg said. He noted that the media’s lack of skepticism
toward and the elevation of accusations against Kavanaugh from a number
of women who later backtracked or admitted their accusations had been
fabricated is something that has “united the right, to this day.”

Hayes summed it up this way: “You see that, and it becomes a pattern.
You get to the point where conservatives say, ‘I don't trust any of it.’”

Former President Barack Obama, who spoke at the conference on Wednesday,
lamented the “breakdown” of the journalistic consensus on how to cover
the news and the rise of misinformation in the age of social media.

“What we’ve seen is a breakdown of that consensus, and what we’ve seen
is a shift in technology and who controls these platforms in ways that
are not transparent. And that has contributed to anger, a sense in which
we are no longer operating by the same rules or on the same facts,”
Obama said.