Fear and self-interest make the media 'catastrophically broken'

The following scenario could happen to you at any time.

With so much media failure inundating us every day, who would think the tale of an anchor, a colleague, an author and an allegation would prove so instructive? The latest episode of They Stand Corrected digs into the mess involving Matt Lauer, Brooke Nevils, and Ronan Farrow. It shows how the media’s rush to create victim narratives and refusal to fact check could affect you, out of nowhere, at any time.

Imagine this

You're going about your life when, suddenly, all these people you know and people you've worked with start contacting you. They say a woman is making a public allegation of rape against a famous man, and that you have information to help support her claim. You're like, "Wait, what?"

They say they're learning about this from news reports about a book that is selling a ton of copies. The book and reports are not using your name, but they’re describing you. It can only be you. The people contacting you assume it must be true, because the author said the book was “fact checked.”

But no one ever contacted you. If they had, you would have told them that this thing that allegedly happened didn't happen. This sounds surreal, right? It can happen to you. We know that because of what did happen.

John Ziegler, a writer at Mediaite, played a pivotal role in exposing Farrow’s fact checking failures. He wrote several columns (here’s one). Lauer himself ended up writing this. John joins me in this episode. He says:

This story, among many others, is the perfect proof that the news media is completely broken and that narratives that are popular or that create fear, and this one created a lot of fear and create, perverse self-interest within the media itself are never going to get debunked… Once a narrative, especially in this area of sexual assault, is created, there's almost no going back in the modern media because it's completely broken in general. But on this particular subject, it's catastrophically broken.

It wasn’t just Farrow. News agencies went wild over a button that, they said, allowed Lauer to lock women in his office. The button became fodder for headlines at The Atlantic and The Washington Post, and was “covered” all over the media. It turned out that the button, common among executive offices in the building, closed but did not lock a door, according to NBC.

Eventually, one journalist at one big news agency, the New York Times, wrote about just some of Farrow’s fact checking fiascoes. (I don’t link to big news organizations that lie regularly. But if you must visit them, do so for free, legally.)

As I explain in this episode, this all speaks to victim narratives and the media's willingness to look the other way when it wants to believe something. It’s the same principle leading to disastrous “coverage” of Israel, treating Hamas claims as fact. The media cast Israel as villain, and dehumanizes Gazans via infantilization. In that mindset, the process of seeking truth is thrown out the window.

This is how journalistic disasters happen all the time And it's why the news media needs to be rebuilt from the ground up based on truth, to give you what you deserve: facts + context.

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