Is the Media Dishonest?

A Facebook debate that I just couldn’t let go.

“The media is the enemy of the people,” — Donald Trump. This quotation was recently posted in a Facebook group I was a member of, followed by a prompt to “Agree or disagree?”

I replied that, especially over the past two years, I have become aware of how much the media is dishonest. I mentioned how it was easy to make fun of the deficiencies of Fox News and their ilk, but I was also becoming wise to how much mainstream and “progressive” media provided false, misleading, or out of context information.

A few moments later, after I logged off, I received a request for sources to verify this claim. When I failed to do so within two hours, I was told by the original poster, who was also the group’s administrator, that I was “full of shit.” Others in the thread quickly agreed, singing the praises of the media.

This was not the first time I’ve been called names for having a contrary opinion, so I quit the group and unfollowed the friend. But the exchange sat with me for some time. I imagine that the poster and I probably agree on 80% of policy issues, but for some reason, we’re always fighting. Why was that? Was civil conversation dead? Was Trump so terrible that everything he said had to be completely wrong, by definition? Was my friend simply ill-informed? Elsewhere on the thread, he said he believed that the media was doing “a great job.”

I stewed, for days, on how I might talk the person out of this perception. Was such a thing even possible, I wondered, or had their own biases become so intractable that no amount of evidence would convince them? What kind of information would even be considered as proof that I was right? If I showed one piece of bad media, corrected by other media, my friend could simply claim “the system works!”

This conundrum is reminiscent of the ‘Science isn’t Broken’ argument on the replication crisis. The fact that scientists were aware of the problem was, in the author’s mind, proof enough that the problem was under control. If that was the case, what evidence would constitute a real crisis in the sciences?

I let the issue go for a few days, until I happened to stumble across an article so terrible, so awful in so many ways, that I just knew it had to be the perfect example of everything wrong with the media.

The article is “Turn Saudi Arabia into trusted partner in Middle East conflict” by The Hill, which is considered both mainstream and also left of center (at least when compared to Politico.) It is an opinion piece, and I suppose my friend might say that opinion isn’t journalism, even if it is published on a news website.

But I believe that editorial content that contains misleading claims, unsupported conjectures, outright falsehoods, and ignores context and conflicts of interest is indeed journalistic malpractice. At the very least, the editor should have stepped in to pull the piece. But they did not.

The piece starts off by first listing a series of reasons to be wary of Saudi Arabia, before poviting to excusing and apologizing for them as a country. They say that Saudi Arabia was “brought in” to the war in Yemen by Tehran. This is inaccurate — Saudi Arabia did not have to go in by any means.

The author mentions that it is “not irrational” for Saudi Arabia to feel a threat by Yemen, this makes little sense considering the billions of dollars of weapons we provide them or the American soldiers stationed there. The article fails to mention that Saudi Arabia’s involvement is contributing to “the world’s worst famine in 100 years.”

The article then claims that Obama was “no friend of the Kingdom,” despite the fact that as soon as he took office, his State Department doubled the amount of arms sales to Saudi Arabia from 4 to 8 billion. By 2016, he was ready to make a sale of $115 in weapons and training to the Saudis. Obama also tried to protect their liability from a 9/11 related lawsuit. Jacobin, a non-mainstream socialist news site, has detailed in great length all the many favors Obama did for Saudi Arabia. The fact that Obama can claim he was a critic of the Kingdom and that the mainstream press lets him get away with it is a testament to how broken things are.

But back to the article from The Hill. As it wraps up, it claims that while Saudi Arabia does have a human rights problem, Tehran is worse. It offers no evidence for this claim, probably because there’s plenty of evidence that Saudi Arabia is actually worse.

Finally, the article concludes with a byline, noting that the author is a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. And this single sentence is where the entire thing really falls apart. Because it requires not just fact-checking, but actually thinking. And that’s where the media really falls down.

The main point of the piece is to defend Saudi Arabia and try to preserve our relationship with them. Why do this? Well, the American Enterprise Institute’s largest donor is ExxonMobil. In addition, the vice-chairman of the group’s board of trustees is the former head of ExxonMobil. Why is that important? Because, in the company’s own words, “Exxon is the largest single corporate investor in Saudi Arabia.”

In other words, Exxon is simply using the American Enterprise Institute (and The Hill) to protect their own investment.

None of the above information is present in the article. This lack of context means that a lay reader of the piece will not understand why it was written, or what motivated the writer to be so dishonest. And the reason is a conflict of interest so brazen that ought to melt the reputation of the American Enterprise Institute (and The Hill.) But it won’t, largely because this is common practice in the media today. I could probably find 20 similar articles within the past 30 days, published in other mainstream sources.

The fact that I used some of these mainstream sources in my own fact-checking doesn’t excuse them. Even if I concede that most articles from most sources are relatively problem-free, that doesn’t address the fact that false and misleading stories are far too common.

The media has the ability to do something about this. But it doesn’t because it sees no incentive to do so. The corporate donors (or corporate owners) like to keep the gravy train flowing. And the readers — even, apparently, well educated, left of center people — are perfectly content with the illusion of competence, especially if it lets them thumb their nose at Trump in the process.

And yet, for pointing this out, I’m the one that’s called“full of shit” by other Democrats on Facebook. Isn’t social media great?