Unnamed sources

  

While The Washington Post has clearly taken an anti-trump stance from before the 2016 election, not all mainstream media beltway media can be blamed for intentionally slanting their news.

Part of the problem for political coverage has to do with the way Beltway reporting is conducted. Beltway reporters and editors have basic journalistic ethical issues on how they gather news.

They tend to rely on a handful of “reliable sources” from whom they go back over and over to get information thus giving insiders in the politics a lot more control over content of final report than is wise or that the general public is aware of.

These “reliable sources” frequently have their own agenda and the leaked information serves a purpose that is benefited by exposure to the media.

This is particularly true of The Washington Post and The New York Times which rely on “reliable” and frequently unnamed sources for their most scathing stories.

For instance early in the Trump Administration, The Washington Post printed a host of stories based on inside information from unnamed sources most of whom turned out to be Steve Bannon, who was then in a power struggle with Jared Kushner as to whom would have the most influence on the newly elected President Trump.

At the same time, Kushner – who is Trump’s son-in-law was leading information aimed at discrediting Bannon, and so major media got the best of both worlds, bashing Bannon and Kushner on one hand, while using both of them as information sources on the other.

A naïve public seemed to accept these inside sources as legitimate leaks rather than opportunistic piranha, and so accepted media’s portrayal of a dysfunctional Trump White House – a position that tended to coincide with the Post’s editorial policies towards Trump.

And since most of the other media outlets quoted The Washington Post, this opinion became gospel, even though it was largely a manufactured story by the Post.

Many of the more legitimate media are used by these so called “legitimate” sources for ends that the reporters may not suspect or are willing to go along with in order to maintain access to high level people feeding them this stuff. Reporter frequently go back again and again to the same sources and so that stories tend to be skewed to a narrow political view and slanted by a small group of people who are influencing the outcome of the stories.

Even when Beltway reporters are b  not quoting directly from The Washington Post, they often publish similar stories – largely because almost all Beltway reporters are going to the same people other reporters are and so come up with the same conclusions, often handed to them by their sources. Often, these are long time government employees, who have been appointed by previous administrations and have an ax to grind – partly because they were loyal to some other president or they were passed over for promotions they thought they deserved.

These bitter insiders often shape the news of even the most diligent reporter and so have more say over what the general public thinks of as fact than is legitimate.

Media, whether intentionally slanted or not, tends to build a case for its stories through “talking heads,” who they claim as experts. These often author opinion pieces or appear on TV and websites to help analyze the subjects reporters have reported on. Most often, these are people who already agree with the media’s take on a story and so merely serve as to support the media organization’s conclusions – often reflecting the same bias. They are often people with conflicts that taints their information. So, you get a parade of former Obama people or cast off from the Trump Administration that are helping bolster the myth that the media is trying to sell. Some are close associates to the media organization, former employees or experts that organization can rely on to give them the analysis they need.

This builds a case in the public’s mind that the media cannot be biased since it has the support of an army of talking heads, when, in fact, is just another tell-tale sign of bias.