On Tuesday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, a panel hosted by Stephanie Ruhle expressed their regret, dismay, and indignation at the implosion of public confidence in established, mainstream media outlets, such as their own. In typical fashion for them, they pinned all the blame on such favorite bogeymen as President Trump and Elon Musk, and showed no self-awareness of the fact that they themselves may have borne much responsibility for the trend, with their own track record of politicized, one-sided, and less-than-transparent reporting.
Raising the subject, Ruhle turned to Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel, with the words, “you've also been reporting on this evolving problem…where less information is coming from newsrooms-right? Legitimate newsrooms- and what's happening is more and more hoaxes are gaining traction on social media, where none of them need to be verified whatsoever.”
Weigel agreed that it was a problem, saying, “[I]t's a decades long process of Americans losing trust in mainstream media.” And without any reflection as to why, he noted: “It was sped up by- at- around COVID it was sped up by Donald Trump. He's the biggest beneficiary, politically, of people saying they don't trust information from mainstream news networks.”
(...)
