Megan McArdle Accidentally Admits That You Can’t Trust the Media

I like Megan McArdle. A lot. 

She is one of the better columnists in the Pravda Media, writing from her perch at the Washington Post in a generally dispassionate manner, which is rare these days. 

But…there is always a but, isn’t there…she has developed blind spots that baffle me. Perhaps it comes from spending so long among the media elite, or perhaps it is due to the fact that she is clearly repelled by Trump. I don’t know, but I still read her because she is smart and often right. 

Megan’s defense of the “mistakes” made in the coverage of Biden’s decline has baffled me, mostly because she seems to uncritically accept the obviously false assertion that what we saw from the media were mistakes at all. 

Who cares whether he admits it? That he was lying has been obvious for five years.

— @KevinGutzman (@KevinGutzman) May 13, 2025

Just as with the people who are urging us to forgive and forget the gaslighting we were subjected to during COVID, the claim being made is that the efforts to shove an obviously false narrative down our throats were well-meaning and easily forgivable. “We all make mistakes, don’t we?” Yeah, well, sure. We all do, and it makes sense to forgive people who own up to genuine mistakes and even praise them for admitting it. 

Admitting to mistakes takes courage. Profiting off one’s self-conscious lies is disgusting. 

So…you are admitting that the entire “mainstream” media is motivated to protect Democrats? Just be clear on that, please.

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) May 14, 2025

What struck me about her defense of Jake Tapper and other media folks for their sudden admission that Biden was demented was her casual assertion that they did so because they WANTED to believe that Biden was just fine, so they swallowed the falsehoods and repeated them because it fit their desires. 

It is not a secret that almost every journalist in legacy media votes for Democrats. As did I–the difference was that I was voting for him only for “Not Trump” reasons, so I didn’t have the same desire for him to be all right.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 13, 2025

“Motivated reasoning” is a very real thing. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to facts or people who we see as on “our side.” We all do. I do, and so does everybody. I wrongly supported Bush’s war in Iraq because I wanted to believe him when he said that Hussein had secret weapons of mass destruction, and that was about as wrong as you could be. 

Lesson learned on that one. 

Scott Jennings points out that the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline is the “greatest scandal in modern American political history.”

“If he had somehow won and were in office, you‘d have the same people on TV today saying, ‘He‘s fine. Behind closed doors, he‘s fine.’” pic.twitter.com/zPXo6JNGZQ

— Rusty (@Rusty_Weiss) May 14, 2025

But, first of all, I believe McArdle is wrong that Tapper and other media figures believed that Biden was fine. Almost nobody sane could possibly have done so because Biden was obviously NOT fine. The whole “cheap fake” argument was clearly a lie, and we have plenty of other evidence that the media knew just as well as anyone else that Biden was toast. Remember the revelation that members of the media would joke about how “dead” Biden would be at any given appearance? 

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors who came away from interactions with Joe Biden disturbed by what they had seen. For @NYMag, I wrote about the conspiracy of silence to protect the president: https://t.co/clKmksK9D8

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) July 4, 2024

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

If reporters are joking about “how dead he [Biden] appeared to be,” they knew he was toast. So forgive me if I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. 

But McArdle’s willingness to extend that benefit of the doubt and assume that defenses of Biden were a “mistake” is based on their having motivated reasoning–they are nearly all Democrats, so they want to believe Democrats–admits that you can’t trust a thing reporters say. 

Being Democrats, they will repeat whatever Democrats want to believe. 

Okey dokey, Megan. Republicans and others have been saying that for years. So much so that I call them the Pravda Media because all they do is repeat the party line. 

Once you admit that, it follows that the media is worse than useless–they are mere propagandists, and whether they believe the lies or not becomes nearly irrelevant except to God, who will judge them in the afterlife. Right here, right now, all we can know for certain is that they are mere conduits for whatever one political party wants said. 

Isn’t that enough? Do we really need to litigate whether they are liars or dupes? Either way, they are conduits for falsehoods that should be ignored and scorned. All that blather about reporting the news without fear or favor is window dressing on a propaganda machine. 

It’s quite a defense of an industry that purports to inform people and prop up democracy.