It is not Trump's fault media is losing credibility

Federalist:
The mainstream press continues to blame President Trump for their credibility woes, without so much as a hat tip to the role their own outlets have played in feeding the trend of distrust by conducting a lot of bad journalism.

In a report on the public’s growing skepticism of the media under Trump, the Associated Press did not mention the pattern of inaccurate, sloppy, reckless, and flat-out false stories from mainstream outlets that has marked the Trump-era of journalism. “Trump has done his part to blur the lines between real and not,” the AP reported, completely ignoring how easy journalists have made it for the president to play this game by feeding him a constant stream of botched reports.

The outlook is bad for media credibility. Poll after poll finds public confidence in the press is at historic lows. The AP cites a Pew Research Center report that two-thirds of Americans believe “fabricated news” is causing a “great deal of confusion” about basic facts, and a poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago found the percentage of Americans expressing a “great deal of confidence” in the press has fallen from 28 percent in 1976 to just 8 percent in 2016.

The American Press Institute put the percentage at an even lower 6 percent in an April 2016 survey, which also found 85 percent of Americans rate getting the facts right as extremely or very important, and prioritize that metric most highly when deciding which news outlets to trust. “Accuracy is the paramount principle of trust,” the survey noted.
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The New York Times in particular was stunningly explicit about its change in editorial direction back in August 2016, when it featured a Jim Rutenberg column on the front page. He wrote he and his peers were ready to “throw out the textbook” of fair journalism and pursue an “oppositional” role.

Indeed, outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the AP have since been forced to issue embarrassing corrections to stories as a result of publishing reports that failed on such basic tenets as reaching out to the subject of the story, not relying too heavily on anonymous sources, checking sources, and conducting a basic review of the facts. And then there’s CNN, which has delivered Trump a shockingly constant stream of shoddy and bizarre reporting that reinforced his designation of the network as “fake news.”
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Several examples are provided of things mainstream media got wrong and it was all in support of a negative narrative about President Trump.  You get the feeling they fell into the trap of "too good to check" reporting.  A Washington Post report suggesting the hacking of a power company by Russia was run without even contacting the power company.  It was wrong.

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