[newhaus1994]

I don't have time to reply to this in-depth, but I think that your comment actually elucidated the biggest issue, which is that this demonization and distrust of the mainstream media has conflated commercialized TV news like CNN (which, I'll freely admit, has embraced terrible framing) with actual news outlets (WashPo, Atlantic, NYTimes, etc). There is a difference between what CNN does and what WashPo does.

Also, having worked in a newsroom myself, I can attest to the fact that the firewall between sales/business and the journalists is real and strong. Not perfect, but it does a hell of a job, and is much, much better than the wild west of financing currently in the indie reporting space.

[dev_dull]

I think you greatly underestimate how much damage even one bad reporter in news organization can be to the entire outfit. During 2016-2018 things were especially bad in the MSM. Even "trustworthy" papers like the ones you listed were "taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay". And I'm supposed to believe they don't have a vested interest in the narrative of their story?

Meanwhile the official OIG report[1] investigated the relationship between our intelligence agencies and reporters. Here's something awful from that report:

> In addition, we identified instances where FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.

Anyone with a critical mind can see that these things stink. They stink from a mile away.

1. https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

[jlawson]

Just another note on your last paragraph - I'm honestly not as concerned about financial corruption from the sales side. That's fairly predictable and orthogonal to most issues that really matter. It's the ideological bent of the reporters and staff themselves that worries me. No different than if the entire media institution was taken over by Scientologists.

[jlawson]

I don't see any major difference between NYT, for example, and CNN et al.

Don't have time to list all the eye-poppingly blatant misconstruals I've seen in NYT.

Big recent one that comes to mind is the Covington Catholic story, where the reporters spent several days blaming the children, even though there were multi-hour videos of the whole event that refuted them available from the first day of the controversy.

[camelite]

There are plenty of issues the WashPo, Atlantic & NYTimes are absolute garbage on.