Just change your media viewing habits for immediate improvement in quality and accuracy

I have been pretty much ignoring this story since it broke.  Partly because it broke in dribs and drabs and partly it is such a repulsive example of the culture of the Washington Mandarin Class.  Those with power and influence, insulating themselves from consequences and pursuing personal agendas rather than serving the nation.

But this is a pretty good summary of the sorry saga.  From The 'Anonymous' saga ended with a dud — a perfect example of the problem of Trump-era media by Steve Krakauer.  Trump entered office with claims against the Fake News media.  And the response of the media has been to spend four years more than justifying his charges.  

It is one thing to erroneously report something based on a biased interpretation where the evidence is occluded.  Where the glass is half full or half empty depending more on observer orientation than empirical measurement.  

It is quite another to manufacture a continuing supply of panic porn based on dubious to the point of provably false information.  I am thinking of the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Ukraine Hoax, the Smollett Hoax, the Mueller Hoax, the Police Bias Hoax, the Kavanaugh Hoax, the Peaceful Protests Hoax, the Charlottesville Hoax, the AGW Hoax, the White Supremacists Hoax.  As Krakauer suggests, from a professional standards point of view, there is a lot to be answered for.  

From his article:

For those who don’t remember the drama that gripped Washington and the Acela media (located along Amtrak’s Acela rail corridor between D.C. and New York City), The New York Times published a column in September 2018 from someone identified as “Anonymous,” whom the Times described as a “senior official inside the Trump administration.” The column, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,’’ detailed the work that the author and others in the administration supposedly were doing to undermine President Trump’s agenda. 

Guesses of who the author was started flowing in. RealClearInvestigations thought it was Victoria Coates. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and current CNN contributor, thought it was Kirstjen Nielsen, based on her use of commas in her resignation letter. But most guesses on Twitter and throughout the media rose to higher ranks. Mike Pence? Nikki Haley? CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote, in retrospect, a spectacularly wrong column titled “13 people who might be the author of The New York Times op-ed.” His arguments included names such as Kellyanne Conway and John Kelly, then some of the top advisers to Trump, as well as “Javanka” and Melania Trump. Dripping with innuendo, it was sure to grab a ton of clicks from CNN’s audience and throughout the #Resistance mediasphere.

And then, this week, we got the big reveal. “Anonymous” was Miles Taylor — a name that is likely literally anonymous to you to begin with. At the time he wrote the original column, Taylor was the deputy chief of staff to the director of Homeland Security — hardly a “senior” Trump administration official. That description by The New York Times was the first major media misstep in all this. If Taylor published the column under his own name and title, it wouldn’t pack nearly the punch it did the way it was shrouded in mystery and secrecy. The only reason the Times would play this game was to deceive its readers, and the entire media world, into thinking the author was someone of far more prominence than Mr. Anonymous, Miles Taylor.

Krakauer is exercised about Taylor's duplicity, his hiring by CNN after having explicitly lied to CNN and by the fact that there are professional consequences to deceptive reporting.

True, but after the long trail of individuals in media who are willing to write false stories and then are covered for by their publications (Rolling Stone's A Rape on Campus story by Sabrina Erdely who had a history of questionable veracity; this very week Atlantic Magazine has had to retract a story by Ruth Shalit Barrett, another reporter with an established history of plagiarism and false reporting.

My outrage is more focused on the New York Times.  They deliberately advanced this story and it appears they were well aware that, completely contrary to their assertion, their source was not a senior administration official but was a lackey out in the outer fields of the federal bureaucracy.  That is straight up lying to their readers.  It can't help but seem worse that this was politically motivated and that, intentionally or not, it exacerbated the appearance of polarization.  

It seems as if, at this point, we have a pretty simple solution to most of our perceived national challenges such as threats of Russia Collusion, Racial Unrest, Police Violence, Antifa Violence, AGW, White supremacism, Systematic and Pervasive Racism, etc.  Stop reading and watching mainstream media.  Rely on blogs and independent news sources, and local platforms.  

Your life will be more serene, the quality and accuracy of reporting will rise, the breadth of news covered will improve, more focus will be brought to bear on real problems rather than manufactured problems, no more polarization.

No legislation required.  Just change your habits.  Bankrupt purveyors of falsehoods.