Dear Media: The Nation Could Really Use You to Have Some Credibility Now; Do You Understand Why You Don't?

For the past five years, the media have lied to us on a daily basis about Donald Trump. They told us he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. They told us he praised white supremacists. They told us he hates gay people. They told us he called all Mexicans criminals. They told us he called the coronavirus a hoax.

None of this was true.

They lied about his policies too. They told people who were getting tax cuts were not getting tax cuts. They told us he was going to inflame the Middle East. They told us he was a patsy for Russia.

They told so many lies about so many things, and they did it solely because they hate the man and they couldn’t sleep at night unless they did everything they could to make you hate him too. They really thought this was their job. They became completely divorced from any commitment to objective truth. They became nothing but propagandists.

And people noticed. As recently as November 2020, a Gallup poll showed only 9 percent of Americans trust the media “a great deal,” while 60 percent have little or no trust in the media. When most people hear a media report, they assume they’re being manipulated and not informed. They factor in all the lies they’ve heard over the course of decades – but especially in the five years Donald Trump has been the target of their ire – and simply dismiss what the media tell them.

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This creates a very serious problem.

Sometimes it is important for the public to distinguish objective truth from nonsense being thrown around by demagogues. Sometimes it’s hard to know what the truth is, and there’s value to having a trustworthy, unbiased source to go to for the straight facts. If the public had trust in the media at a time like this, it could process the real facts and step back from the brink to which they were led by irresponsible claims.

We could use a media like that at a time like this. And we don’t have it.

For the past five years, the media have been falsely accusing Donald Trump of lying. The public long ago got tired of it and tuned them out. But for the past two months, Donald Trump really has been lying. He’s been claiming he actually won the election “in a landslide” and somehow the votes got thrown away or given to Joe Biden. That is not true. He’s been claiming Congress could overturn the results in the states and declare him the winner. Congress can’t do that. He’s been claiming Mike Pence had the authority to reject Biden electoral votes and give those votes to Trump. Pence has no such authority, and there’d be no reason to exercise it if he did.

The media have been telling the public for the past two months that Trump is lying, and they’re right. He is. And a significant percentage of the population doesn’t believe them. After Russiagate, Charlottesville and so many other media lies, these people simply assume the media are being as unfair to Trump as they’ve always been.

If the media had been conducting itself with integrity for the past five years, maybe there wouldn’t have been so many people willing to angrily breach the Capitol building on Wednesday. Maybe their “fact check” in this case might have had some credibility if they hadn’t published thousands of them that were utter garbage.

It’s not just the media saying Trump is off the rails here. It’s much of his own cabinet. It’s his own Justice Department. It’s House and Senate Republicans. It’s Republican election officials in the contested states. It’s the vice president. It’s conservative editorialists like those at National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

But even that you don’t know unless you hear it from the media, and for those who stopped believing the media long ago, it’s easy to dismiss even those people.

It’s not healthy to be so devoted to any one person that you automatically believe anything he says, and that’s the way far too many people are when it comes to Donald Trump. He’s been a much better president than the media wanted you to think – at least until the last few months – but he is far from beyond reproach, and lately his words and his actions have deserved considerable scrutiny.

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When you believe things that aren’t true because you’re far too trusting of the man telling you these things, that’s on you.

But when the media tell you the man’s statements aren’t true, and you don’t believe them because they’ve been falsely accusing this same man for the past five years, that’s on them.

We could really use a credible media right now. But we have what we have.