From Trump to Police Shootings: Mainstream Media Has an Obligation Not to Regurgitate the Official Line Without Context or Skepticism
The Over-reliance on Official Sources, and the Pratfalls of False Objectivity

Reporters will likely have less direct access to the President-elect than any administration in modern history. President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t held a traditional press conference since July. Since the election, his biggest olive branch to the press was inviting news celebrities to a useless off-the-record meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Photos were, naturally, allowed. What remains is a one-direction communication channel of outbursts, unfounded claims, outright lies, and falsehoods that stream from the president-elect’s Twitter account. It leaves little room for rebuttal, follow-up, or challenge. In this environment, reporters will have an even greater responsibility not to simply repeat and report his flexible truths without context, verification, and skepticism.
Blind service to the ideas of “fairness” or “objectivity” at the opposition of verifiable truth is neither fair nor objective, and instead presents false equivalencies. Imagine a debate between the Flat Earth Society and Magellan, with reporters giving equal time and credence to both side’s statements. Now look at the mainstream media’s treatment of a verifiably false tweet from Trump last year. The tweet re-tweeted a photo, that’s since been deleted, that claimed 81 percent of murdered white people are killed by black people-a lie that originated with a white supremacist on Twitter. The actual stats, according to the FBI, are basically the opposite: Whites killed by blacks, 15 percent. Whites killed by whites, 82 percent. Dismayingly, Fox News wrote, “Trump Tweet on Black Crime Sets Off Firestorm.” The Hill reported “Trump Takes Heat for Tweet About Black Murder Rates,” and on and on.
The lie was reported ad nauseum without immediate disclaimers. The Hill did address the truth in the lower body of its story. But a flood of headlines—shared, clicked, and streamed across social media—can mutate outright lies or “truthiness” into something resembling consensus.
The obligation does not begin or end with coverage at the Trump White House. Media’s reluctance to stray from official statements has been clear in the mainstream coverage—often without clarification, context, or rebuttal—of topics ranging from police shootings of unarmed black civilians to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
In the case of the Dakota pipeline protests, official reports from the sheriff’s office often defended, minimized, or omitted violent treatment of protesters. The wealth of photo and video evidence available that rebutted sheriff’s reports should have been enough to lend skepticism to the coverage. CNN and other mainstream outlets repeated the claims from law enforcement that the water cannon used against protesters in below-freezing temperatures was a response to fires set by “armed protesters.” Again, video evidence points to the contrary.