Journalism in America today

Mollie Hemingway looks at the state of journalism today:

It’s absolutely true that we don’t have a wave of outright fabrication-out-of-whole-cloth. But what we have is much worse. We have a tsunami of inaccuracy that is generally tolerated, embraced and even celebrated so long as it serves the right political and cultural goals.

But the real problem doesn’t seem, at this point, to be about journalistic invention so much as adoption of narratives at the expense of facts.

I know you’re shocked — shocked! — that AP reporter Philip Elliott inaccurately described speeches about abortion. But note that it fit the media’s general narrative of downplaying news that might be damaging to the pro-choice movement — COUGH GOSNELL COUGH — while distorting and hyping news about pro-lifers to make them look bad.

Far too many reporters covering this administration are willing to swallow whole the outlandish claims made by officials regarding what happened in the IRS scandal and, basically, every other scandal that we’ve seen in the last six years. The way Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone treated Jackie is the way a lot of reporters treat the causes, candidates and White House that they love and are passionate about.

Read more here.