Journalism has a long-standing adage: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
The point is clear: sources you talk to are motivated, facts can be wrong, spun, taken out of context, or outright lies. Since a journalist’s job is to present to the readers/viewers/listeners as accurate a picture of reality as they can, it is their job to cobble together as many sources as possible, since the news consumers cannot.
Otherwise, what is the point of having journalists? If we all have to do the work of verifying everything and cobbling together all the sources to get a reasonably accurate picture, the journalists are superfluous, or even worse–“misinformers.”
🚨NEW: Chuck Todd blames “sources” for reporters’ failure to cover Biden’s decline🚨
“The real culprits are the people who are supposed to be our sources on all these things, who were constantly reassuring us behind the scenes, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s better than you think.'”… pic.twitter.com/arnRaEwDOQ
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) May 11, 2025
The best journalists are cynics, not because cynicism is the ideal attitude, but because it is the nature of their job that everybody they talk to has motivations that must be questioned. That is particularly true when dealing with politics or economics, but it is as true about science or human interest stories.
If somebody wants to be in a news story, they have a reason. It may not be nefarious, but there is little doubt that it will color the story.
So when I saw this clip of Chuck Todd whining that the news media deceived Americans on the Biden story, I almost snorted my Coke Zero out of my nose.
What Todd is saying is what we all know by now is true: journalists are basically stenographers for the people they like to hang out with.
Well, duh.
Journalists today are PR agents for the Democrats because almost all their sources are Democrats, and all of them are members of the establishment. When you read “experts say,” what is meant is “My hand-picked sources say.” None of these sources are “vetted” in any meaningful way, and the only time you hear dissenting voices is in the context of debunking them, insulting them, smearing their character, or at the very least, slighting their opinions.
What has always been striking to me is how often the media feeds us the line from some anonymous source who has demonstrably lied to them, yet the journalists never tell us who lied. Supposedly, the sources are given anonymity because they have inside information that reveals something unique, but if that something unique is a falsehood, then the falsehood is the story, and the source should become the focus of investigation.
Lying to the media–and hence the public–in order to smear an opponent is a big story. If James Comey leaks something that turns out to be a lie, the story that the FBI Director lied to undermine a sitting president is a huge story that should be told. Honoring a commitment for anonymity after the source conned you is stupid and just encourages sources to lie. If the quid is true information and the quo is anonymity, then the deal is off if it is based on fraud.
But as Todd inadvertently admits, all journalists ever do is be stenographers for insiders, parroting whatever they are told, shaping stories to make their buddies look good.
In a sane world, journalists would talk to sources, of course, but they would verify everything, get context and opposing points of view, and come up with something close to the truth.
After all, in the case Todd is talking about, there were certainly a ton of people who could have told them that Biden was toast–hell, the only people who didn’t say that were the Pravda Media and their “sources.”
Let’s take Todd at his word that he genuinely didn’t know he was lied to back then. The question then becomes whether he or any other journalist should talk to the liars anymore.
If they cared about the truth, the answer is “Obviously not.” But we all know that those liars will remain key sources, their utterances will be dutifully repeated by the reporters forever, and that the game will go on.
That’s because the truth was never and will never be the point with this class of “journalist.” All they care about is proximity to power.
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