Why the Media Keep Getting It Wrong

By Becket Adams

Sunday, May 25, 2025

 

The corporate press’s greatest flaw is its willingness to believe the worst of its enemies and the best of its friends.

 

This inflexible posture, which overwhelmingly favors the left, is at the root of everything wrong with our modern news media.

 

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson are on a speaking-slash-apology tour to promote their new book, which details how White House and Democratic officials conspired to keep Joe Biden’s physical and mental decline a secret from voters. Much of the tour has been dedicated to explaining and, in some instances, excusing how the press, a multibillion-dollar industry whose entire reason for existence is to notice things, “missed” what 86 percent of Americans saw plain as day.

 

There are no reasonable excuses for what happened, though. Worse yet, this shameful episode is merely the latest in a long string of journalistic failures, all stemming from the same instinct: Trust your allies, doubt your enemies. Or, put more simply: Left good, right bad.

 

Take the lab-leak theory of Covid-19’s origin. When conservatives such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested the virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, members of the press rushed to dismiss the idea as racist and conspiratorial. Today, a lab-leak origin is broadly accepted as not just plausible but, in the view of some intelligence agencies, likely.

 

Then there is the Hunter Biden laptop. The New York Post, a right-leaning outlet, was the first to break the story, revealing evidence that Hunter may have been engaged in an international influence-peddling operation implicating his father. Major outlets shouted the story down. Politico and others uncritically repeated claims from intelligence “experts” that the laptop bore the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

 

The laptop and its contents are authentic, as Hunter Biden himself testified under oath. Covid may have escaped from a sloppily administered Chinese lab. Joe Biden was clearly in poor health even before his inauguration.

 

None of these stories were fake. These were not conspiracies plucked from the right-wing fever swamp.

 

However, in each case, the press reflexively disputed the evidence, not because the facts were too hard to find, but because the stories came from the “wrong” messengers. The facts were not hidden; they were ignored, dismissed, or discounted altogether because the messengers were disfavored.

 

This relates to what political commentator Ruy Teixeira has called the Fox News Fallacy: If a conservative says it, it must be false, or at least wildly overblown.

 

Of course, conservatives can be mistaken. They even lie. (Some lie a lot.) But that’s not enough to assume correctly that all conservatives are wrong all the time. It requires a simplistic mentality to approach news in this manner, reflexively dismissing information here and data there because you dislike the source. Unfortunately, this is what we see in newsrooms across the country: journalists operating under the assumption that if a disfavored person or outlet asserts something, it must be ignored or, in some cases, vigorously disputed, regardless of the facts or whether what was said is plausible.

 

Amazingly, members of our corporate press continue to cling to this warped framework, even after the monumental, reputation-shattering embarrassment of the Biden health scandal.

 

Last week, for example, Vice President JD Vance raised a perfectly reasonable concern: that the White House may have concealed Biden’s cancer diagnosis from the public, just as it tried to hide his cognitive decline. We don’t, at this point, have evidence that this occurred. But given the record, it is a valid suspicion.

 

However, members of the press immediately framed Vance’s remarks as a partisan smear. “JD Vance wasted no time sharing his concerns that the former president was not ‘capable of doing the job,’ fueling the MAGA conspiracy about a ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s health,” read one post. NBC News lamented that bipartisan sympathy had given way to “suggestions from Trump’s allies” that Biden’s team had “masked his condition.”

 

They have learned nothing. This pattern extends well beyond Biden’s health.

 

Last week, the BBC, NBC News, and PBS had to walk back false reports claiming Israel was about to starve 14,000 babies in Gaza. It was an obscene and obviously implausible accusation — a modern blood libel — and yet these outlets ran with it because their tribal lens made the lie seem credible.

 

This reflexive tribalism has crippled the journalistic class, hindering its members’ ability to perform their jobs even half competently. The instinct to filter information through a “left good, right bad” filter has prevented them from developing a finely tuned sense of skepticism, whether toward a dubious report they’re conditioned to accept as true or toward friendly sources who are clearly covering up an inconvenient fact. They have grown so accustomed to assuming the worst of their enemies and the noblest intentions of their allies that they have forgotten how to ask basic questions or notice when something is amiss.

 

That posture is why the industry spent years chasing Russiagate-style fantasies while dismissing credible stories broken by conservative reporters.

 

NBC reported just last week that Donald Trump promoted a “baseless claim” of white genocide in South Africa. Trump seems to have exaggerated, yes, by labeling it “genocide,” but the claim was not “baseless.” There is a great deal of violence and murder in South Africa, much of it directed at white farmers.

 

Yet, at this point — after Covid, the laptop, Russiagate, “mostly peaceful” riots, Biden’s obvious decline — who could blame anyone for second-guessing the media’s coverage of even Trump’s hyperbole?

 

We have reached the point where the safer bet is often on the story our press dismisses out of hand.