| > they course correct and offer corrections when they get things wrong. I have yet to see this actually happen with any topic of international relevance. To this day most US media consider themselves completely innocent in peddling Iraq WMDs and "Saddam involved with 9/11!" lies. They just repeat what "anonymous government sources" supposedly "leak" to them and then act like it must be truth manifest. This is also in their own interest: Being too critical of these "anonymous government sources" can result in being locked out of this special access, which is something no journalist or news agency can afford. For a more concrete, and relevant, example just take a look at the Bloomberg "The Big Hack" story [0]. One year later and still nobody could produce an actual sample of such a chip, and even national security agencies, like the DHS, could not confirm the story and had no reason to doubt the involved companies' statements [1]. Yet to this day Bloomberg stands by that story [2], no correction, no admission of having gotten anything wrong. But it did a good enough job of further spreading the "China spying on everybody even worse than FiveEyes!" FUD. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... [1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/10/06/statement-dhs-press-secr... [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-... |
For example:
> Daniel Okrent, then-public editor of the The New York Times, went further in his column on the paper's mea culpa. His summary could have applied to many other media outlets: "Some of the Times coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles ... that challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part1/wmd.h...