In Part One I recalled the media frenzy, and academic dishonesty surrounding the 2006 Duke lacrosse rape case. I then gave other examples of why academia, particularly the faculty, have lost the trust of so many of us.
The other institution that was so instrumental in the Duke lacrosse rape case scandal was the media. Well… to be fair… not all the media. Just that which has come to be known as the “legacy” media.
An academic definition of “legacy media” can be found here.
“[L]egacy media is really just another way of describing our historic, traditional sources of information, whether it be newspapers, radio, or television. Calling something ‘legacy’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’s negative — it just means it is an older form, perhaps beyond its usefulness or even irrelevant at times.”
Except for the loss of “usefulness” and “irrelevant” part, that’s an example of the very spin that has undermined the credibility of the legacy media.
Most people using the term do intend a negative meaning — because the legacy media has earned that negative image. Here’s an example of why. The article discusses the media bias in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
The anti-Trump bias existed back in his first term as President, as illustrated here
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/media-trump-hatred-coverage/ “To say that the big networks haven’t exactly had a love affair with Donald Trump, as they plainly did with President Obama, is an understatement. A new survey shows that not only is coverage of Trump overwhelmingly negative, but the president’s biggest accomplishment — the roaring economy — gets almost no attention.”
Media bias, and lack of concern with truth, didn’t start with Trump’s emergence on the political scene. So those exhibiting the bias can’t claim it’s justified because of their imagined “threat” posed by the Orange bad man.
As was subsequently revealed in analysis of the Duke scandal, those faculty members who were so vocal about the alleged guilt of the lacrosse players were getting nearly all their information about the episode from media reports.
You could be generous and say those faculty members were just gullible fools who bought the media lies. I’ll leave it to them to decide if they want to be known as blatant liars, or just breathtakingly dumb.
But the media doesn’t deserve any such benefit of the doubt. A decade before the Duke incident, there was Richard Jewell. Do you remember him?
The media fell all over themselves reporting that Jewell was the “Atlanta Olympic Park bomber.” That reporting ended up costing them financially. Jewell later filed libel lawsuits against several major media companies and reached settlements with CNN and NBC, among others.
You’d think after that costly fiasco — and the debacle of the Duke case — the legacy media (NBC News in particular) would have learned their lesson. But nooooooo…
In my column last week, I mentioned that I was involved in the initial review of the George Zimmerman case. So when I heard the NBC news broadcast of the recording of the 911 call by Zimmerman I knew it had been edited — which NBC ultimately admitted it had done.
NBC was not the only media source to have (I’ll be generous here) “misreported” the facts of the Zimmerman case. And whether you want to hear this, or not, I’m gonna say it: The only media outlets that reserved editorializing in their reporting about that case were the ones considered “conservative” — such as Fox News. They waited for the actual facts to come out.
That’s not to say that some of the broadcast personalities on Fox don’t get carried away at times.
In 2005, nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford was kidnaped from her Florida home, then raped and murdered by John Couey — a convicted sex offender. The investigation that lead to Couey’s arrest indicated some members of his family may have withheld information about his whereabouts from the police.
At the time of that case the host of a prime-time show on Fox bloviated about the Lunsford case on multiple broadcasts. That host insisted the family members should be prosecuted. The legal reality of doing so was apparently irrelevant to that insistence.
I was familiar with Florida law, and even had some inside information from the prosecutors in the Lunsford case. So when I heard the host’s on air insistence that the family members be prosecuted I knew it was just another media loudmouth talking through his hat.
The only way the family members could have been prosecuted was if Couey testified against them. Since he was facing the death penalty, the only way prosecutors could have secured his testimony (if at all) would be to make a deal with him — to waive the death penalty.
What that big-time celebrity Fox host was proposing was that prosecutors make a deal with a repeat sex-offender — who had kidnapped, brutally raped and murdered a child — in order to convict someone else of a lessor crime that would have possibly resulted in a few years in prison at most…
Aside from the dubious morality of making such a deal, speaking as an expert on the subject I can say Couey’s credibility with the jury under those circumstances would have been equally as dubious. The jurors’ would likely be so repelled by such a deal they would acquit the family member to show their disgust. A disgust which would not doubt be shared by most of the public.
No ethical, respectable prosecutor would ever consider making such a deal. The Lundsford prosecutors didn’t — to the chagrin of the media host.
But I’m sure that host thought he sounded tough on the air which was no doubt his agenda. That illustrates the problem with so much of the media; they have agendas that skew their supposed journalistic objectivity. Their opinions, and reporting, are too often divorced from reality. What’s worse, they don’t seem to give a damn.
The media was not interested in waiting for the truth about Richard Jewell before labeling him a mass murderer. But while that was a matter of over-reacting to a contemptible leak by the FBI based on pure speculation, the media are even worse when reporting on an event that feeds a favored narrative.
Too many in the legacy media seem to lack any ability for introspection. For example, a prominent on-air CBS news personality recently lamented that the media has lost the trust of the viewers — yet expressed zero recognition of why that is.
Well… may I humbly suggest it might have something to do with CBS editing the tape of an interview with Trump?
CBS also favorably edited an interview of Kamala Harris that aired during the recent election campaign.
The bias was so blatant, even the Harris campaign wanted the public to know (or at least believe) the campaign had nothing to do with the editing.
Could those be examples of why the public doesn’t trust the legacy media? Add to that litany the media cover-ups of so much of the truth about COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the truth about Joe Biden’s cognitive deficiencies.
Or how about the prominent ABC news host who just last week agreed to pay Trump $15 million, and issue an apology, for repeatedly falsely stating on air that “two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.”
To hear those in the legacy media whining that they have lost credibility I have a suggestion. Look in a mirror!
Academia is where most really bad narratives are hatched. Those narratives are then incubated there and get couched in obfuscatory high-sounding language. Students are then infected by the faculty — and go out into society like a cadre of Typhoid Marys spreading those narratives.
The legacy media then amplifies the narratives the academics who dreamed them up in the first place.
It’s a self-fulfilling cycle of dumbassery. Is it any wonder the public doesn’t trust them?