Cable News, it's their own fault

Julie Reeder

Publisher

We have an Associated Press story on page D-6 about the dwindling interest in national news. It’s largely credited to the 2020 presidential elections, racial reckoning and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The part of the story that is missing (as is typical with The Associated Press) are the proven missteps, lies, defamation, and blatantly bad reporting that their audience is finally figuring out.

We’ve endured the Governor Andrew Cuomo debacles, along with his brother Chris Cuomo’s firing from CNN following his inappropriate use of his journalistic standing to cover up his brother’s alleged sexual assaults; CNN’s chief Legal Analyst Jeffery Toobin exposing himself, CNN producers who are being investigated for inappropriate activity with children, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We were fed hateful angry anti-Trump conspiracies for three years, including the Russia Conspiracy and Ukraine gate, which was proven to be not true, and they ran out of disgraced lying politicians like Adam Schiff, to parade in front of the camera. How different would it have been if they just reported the facts? What if cable news would have been willing to report that the now discredited dossier was paid opposition research by the DNC and Hillary’s campaign?

Amy Robach, an ABC anchor, exposed her network through Project Veritas, after the network "quashed" her interview, suggesting that ABC had yielded to threats from powerful forces.

Epstein Island for pedophiles was labeled a conspiracy theory, until it wasn’t. The media was complicit, as so many other things, and many young girls paid the price.

Then there was Nick Sandmann, one of the Covington Catholic students who has won at least three defamation lawsuits against CNN, Washington Post and NBC. These suits were for hundreds of millions of dollars, but the amount settled hasn’t been disclosed. I believe there are three more that are yet unsettled.

“My life changed forever in that one moment. The full war machine of the mainstream media revved up into attack mode,” Sandmann said about the news at a Republican Convention. “They did so without ever researching the full video of the incident, without ever investigating Mr. Phillips’s motives or without ever asking me for my side of the story. And do you know why? Because the truth wasn’t important. Advancing their anti-Christian, anti-conservative, anti-Donald Trump narrative was all that mattered.”

Then there was Jussie Smollett, who the media without questioning just supported openly when he reported that he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack. Mainstream media ended up with egg on their faces when Smollett was not only found out to be lying, but ended up being convicted on chargers that he lied to police

Then there was Kyle Rittenhouse. Several media outlets reported outright lies, again. They reported that he brought a gun across the state line. They reported that he shot black people and portrayed him as a white supremacist. Again, not true.

Now Rittenhouse says there will be a reckoning for the media for the way they misrepresented him, as they did Nick Sandmann. It seems lawsuits are the only way to make them feel the sting of blatant lies. You can lie about public figures, like Trump, but you can’t lie about high school children.

People are getting tired of biased propaganda when they are looking for news.

So, while Chris Cuomo will be gone and there will be reduced hours for Rachel Maddow, that’s not where it ends. Alternative media is filling the gap. Epoch TV, OANN and Newsmax are all growing. Joe Rogan, who may have the world’s most popular podcast on Spotify, is reported to have 10 million listeners, in addition to hundreds of millions of people who have watched his top shows on YouTube. Even a fairly new show, Timcast IRL, with independent journalist Tim Pool, gives nightly news a run for their money.

They aren’t in bed with the White House or going to meetings where there are agreements made on how stories will be reported, or how successful alternative treatments for COVID-19 will be mischaracterized. Their sponsors aren’t Pfizer and Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson.

So as a person in the industry, I can testify to the fact that rhetoric and narrative has taken over and is killing the major networks. Unless they can turn it around and replace rhetoric with real unbiased investigative reporting, their audiences will be sitting with them in their echo chamber, angry and constantly afraid, hearing lies and more misinformation. Meanwhile independent news and new media will fill the space with open minds, facts from both sides, and critical thinking.