Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has an interesting column in USA Today explaining how the New York Times managed to get an editorial about supposed hypocrisy of the NRA convention’s gun rules very wrong – so wrong the paper had to issue a correction about its editorial, which apparently still needs work. In Charlie Cooke’s take on the New York Times’ NRA debacle, he noted that MSNBC ended up in “a maze of corrections” about the gun policy, too.
The NRA story wasn’t the only one the media got massively wrong recently, Reynolds notes:
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism published on April 5 a review of Rolling Stone’s utter failure in reporting on the alleged University of Virginia fraternity gang rape that turned out to be a hoax. The story’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the magazine’s fact-checkers — who seemed much tougher in the movie Almost Famous — failed to perform even basic due diligence, to the point that they even quoted people who were never interviewed, based on uncorroborated hearsay that turned out to be false. . . .
Last week Bloomberg News ran, and then retracted a report that Nancy Reagan had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Except that it came from a parody news site and wasn’t even slightly true.
Why is this happening? Media organizations are filled with people who think the same way, believe in the same things, and all share the same ignorance about certain things, he explains:
There are a lot of those lately, it seems, and they have a couple of things in common. The first is that they are a product of ignorance stemming from a lack of newsroom diversity. Anyone with any knowledge of guns, or the NRA, would have doubted the claim that firing pins were removed from people’s carry guns. But such familiarity is apparently unwelcome at The Times. Rolling Stone’s lurid gang-rape story read like bad fiction (which it was) but fed prejudices about fraternities and “white privilege” in a campus “rape culture.” And the notion that Reagan might endorse Clinton was believable only to people who didn’t know much about Reagan but had high hopes for Clinton.
The other thing these stories have in common is that they all served Democratic Party talking points, whether based on anti-gun thinking, “war on women” sloganeering, or pro-Hillary sentiment. For whom journalists are rooting, of course, is no mystery to most news media consumers, but it’s telling that the errors so often point in the same direction. (As columnist Kurt Schlichter tweeted, the corrections to news stories never seem to make conservatives look worse than the original.) That’s a diversity problem, too, of course: When everyone in the newsroom shares the same political leaning, groupthink and outright propagandizing get a lot easier.
Incidentally, I was on MSNBC this Sunday to talk about Social Security’s insolvency. (They had read this piece from last week, very likely thanks to Patrick Brennan’s great title writing skills!) I didn’t get to talk much because I was doing the interview remotely from D.C., and I wasn’t too surprised that the other guests didn’t take talk of reforming Social Security too seriously, saying the program could easily be made solvent by the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax.
What did surprise me, however, is how a group who claims to care about blacks, minorities, and the poor never talk about the fundamental injustice of Social Security. The unfairness of the program has been well documented. The work of economist Eugene Steuerle at the Urban Institute (not a think tank run by raging supply-siders or libertarians) has shown that, while Social Security has accomplished its core mission of providing basic protection to most seniors, the program redistributes income from blacks and minorities to whites, from the young (and relatively poor) to the old (and relatively wealthy), and from the single to the married (in addition to providing a terrible return on investment of tax dollars). If I get a chance next time around, I will make sure to start off by asking how Democrats feel about that aspect of their beloved program.