There’s a word mainstream news organizations default to when massaging inconvenient truths about political candidates they sympathetically embrace: “complicated.”
From Abdul El-Sayed and Ilhan Omar to Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton, a look at one of corporate media’s favorite euphemisms.
“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
That was the order given to journalists at Canada’s taxpayer-supported CBC broadcast network as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The ensuing backlash forced CBC to reverse course.
The leaked directive wasn’t an isolated lapse. It reflects a troubling institutional record that extends from CBC’s coverage of the October 7 Hamas massacres to its reporting on the Nazi past of former Liberal cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland’s maternal grandfather.
NBC News deserved the humiliation it suffered after General Motors revealed that Dateline had rigged its infamous 1992 pickup-truck explosion with model rocket engines.
What history largely forgot is that GM’s trucks really did pose a serious safety hazard—and that the automaker had a documented history of punishing major publications whose coverage it didn’t like.
Three decades later, as federal regulators scrutinize safety issues involving more than two million GM vehicles, that forgotten history offers an uncomfortable lesson about the state of automotive journalism.
Journalists have long insisted that credible news organizations aren’t bought and paid for.
The Randall Lane controversy at Forbes makes that argument much less convincing.
How many flies are buzzing around the Oval Office walls? Apparently enough to reconstruct top-secret meetings, presidential frustrations, and internal debates in remarkable detail.
The more alarming question is why corporate journalistic curiosity is so selective.
America has an elitist hierarchy problem.
The people who build and repair things get mocked.
The people with the résumés are revered.
Jimmy Kimmel’s disrespect for plumbers exposed the disconnect.
The biggest threat to journalism isn’t President Trump. It’s what corporate journalists have become.
Statistically speaking, the Detroit News should have been buried long ago. That it has been ranked Michigan’s best newspaper for three consecutive years and is preparing to revive a Sunday print edition qualifies as journalism’s version of a “man bites dog” story.
The mainstream media was gunning for Bari Weiss even before she ever took the reins at CBS News. This week, Weiss gave her critics a holiday gift that made their task remarkably easy.
The Washington Post’s decision to publish AI-generated podcasts despite internal warnings about errors reflects a broader shift underway in American journalism.