From: https://shorturl.at/MRRS4 (amac.us) 

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   Is Legacy Media Finally Ready to Admit Its Honesty Problem? 
   
   Posted on Sunday, January 4, 2026
   By David P. Deavel

   Does legacy television news have a future? For a variety of reasons, it
   seems unlikely. Most of those reasons boil down to this: Americans just
   don't trust the establishment media. But if veteran newsman Tony
   Dokoupil's recent monologue on this subject is any indication, the
   industry still isn't prepared to acknowledge that it has sacrificed
   public trust for the sake of advancing liberal partisan narratives.

   Let's give him one-and-a-half cheers, however. Dokoupil is at least
   willing to say out loud that very few people trust his network, CBS
   News, or the rest of the legacy media. Dokoupil is set to start as a
   new anchor for CBS on Monday.

   In his admission of guilt, Dokoupil confessed that he has had
   "thousands of conversations" with ordinary Americans, from his mom's
   West Virginia neighbors to his own New York neighborhood, to countless
   other spots in the country, about what Americans think legacy news has
   misreported. He listed a few of the topics: NAFTA, the Iraq War,
   Hillary Clinton's emails, COVID-19 lockdowns, Russiagate, the Hunter
   Biden laptop, and "the president's fitness for office."

   It's a pretty thorough list, to be honest. The media indeed screwed up
   all of these stories, to the detriment of the country.

   Dokoupil's explanation of what went wrong, however (in other words, why
   the media failed to report these stories accurately) is the reason he
   cannot receive even two cheers. "On too many stories, the press has
   missed the story," he said. "Because we've taken into account the
   perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too
   much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on
   you."

   Politically speaking, one can see why he wants to frame this media bias
   as a matter of "elites," "academics," and "advocates" versus ordinary
   Americans.

   That explanation has some truth to it. During the height of COVID,
   legacy journalists kept telling Americans all sorts of myths about
   lockdowns, masks, the susceptibility of children to the disease, and
   much more. All of these were sold as "The Science." A parade of
   "academics" and "experts" were brought forth to scold all those who
   cast doubt on whatever new commandments were being brought down from
   the mountain by Tony Fauci.

   The more important truth, however, is this: on COVID and all the other
   stories Dokoupil mentioned, there were elites and experts who could and
   did contradict these narratives. Medical researchers such as Jay
   Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Scott Atlas were all vocal critics of
   the approaches and conclusions of the public health apparatus in the
   early days of the pandemic. Academics like these three, affiliated with
   Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and many other prestigious medical and
   scientific organizations, were treated as cranks.

   The reality is that there are always elites and even academics (though
   fewer of the latter because the academy has become actively hostile
   toward anyone right-of-center) willing to give assessments on a variety
   of topics that are contrary to the establishment narrative.

   But to the legacy media, these were the wrong elites and academics.
   These other, disfavored academics and elites were advocating the wrong
   points.

   What were the "right" points? This question brings us to Dokoupil's
   third category of media talking heads: "advocates." Nobody objects to
   the media giving a platform to advocates. People curious about stories
   want to know what the people who have vested interests in them will say
   and how they will spin things. Again, however, the problem with the
   legacy media is that only advocates of particular views are allowed to
   speak.

   What Dokoupil fails to admit is that the media did not just "miss" the
   truth about stories like Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop. They
   actively and consciously suppressed facts and views that conflicted
   with their own preferred narrative.

   The real problem with legacy news organizations is that Americans can
   see that decisions about what to cover and how to cover it are nakedly
   partisan. In all of the examples Dokoupil cites, whether the media
   covered each story was determined using this analysis: 1.) whether a
   story hurts the Republicans and their allies, and 2.) whether it helps
   the Democrats and their allies. To give one prominent example, former
   CBS journalist Catherine Herridge recently spoke about her own
   investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop. Nearly two years after social
   media and legacy media went along with the "expert" view that the
   Hunter Biden laptop story was "Russian disinformation," Herridge had
   done the work of a journalist in investigating it. It was certainly not
   disinformation. The laptop was real and certainly Biden's. And it had
   some atrocious information about Hunter and his father.

   But Herridge's damning revelations were buried because they could hurt
   the Democrats and thus help Republicans. "When we did the story, we did
   it after the [2022] midterms," she said. "I argued against that because
   it was ready before the midterms, and my training is that you should
   always do the story when it's ready to go. You should not be dictated
   by the political cycle."

   This is the reality that we all know. Dokoupil knows it, too. He might
   as well admit it, instead of hinting around.

   Are there reasons for hope? I think there might be. In October,
   Dokoupil challenged Senator Elizabeth Warren to her face about her
   denial that Democrats want to give taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits
   to illegal aliens. In November, he interviewed New York Fire Department
   commissioner Robert S. Tucker, who announced his resignation because of
   Zohran Mamdani's electoral victory.

   To his credit, Dokoupil hasn't been following the political criteria
   for reporting. Nor has he been paying attention to "ordinary Americans"
   versus "elites" and "academics," as parts of his speech might imply.
   Instead, he's just trying to do something he mentions at the end of his
   speech: "telling the truth." Sure, his reporting still contains some
   things for conservatives to gripe about. But acknowledging that the
   media has lost the trust of the public and needs to work to gain it
   back is a start.

   If the legacy media survives and finds a way to thrive, it will be
   because more reporters and executives decide to tell the truth, the
   whole truth, and nothing but the truth - and because they decide that
   the truth is more important than propping up the Democrat Party.
===

-- Sean

... "Quick!  What's the number for 911?" - Homer Simpson
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