In 2024, saw Americans trust in the legacy media hit an all-time low, with only 31% of people saying they have a great deal or even a fair amount of trust in the biggest outlets that bring us our news. Among independent voters, that number is only 27%. In fact, according to Gallup, today, the media is the least trusted civic and political institution, behind even Congress, the group that was previously at the bottom of the barrel.
In this episode of Morning Wire, Daily Wire, culture reporter Megan Basham looks at the bungled stories, bad reporting, and in some cases outright deceptions that contributed to media distrust in 2024. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley, and this is a special edition of Morning Wire.
Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham joins us now to look back at the year's biggest media fails that are contributing to the public's record low trust. But Megan, before we get into that, can you give us a quick overview on where the industry stands now? Along with some of the controversies and corrections, there was also a lot of contraction this year in the news industry, and that's notable because it was an election year.
Yeah, very true. And I do have to say that the media landscape right now looks bad. It looks really bad. If you remember Georgia right before the start of the year, we saw substantial layoffs at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and PR. And as you said, that's not what you expect to see heading into a major campaign year when media revenues typically tend to increase.
Then if we go back to the beginning of the year, in January, the Los Angeles Times cut more than 20% of its newsroom. Time magazine cut 15%. And that kind of bad news just continued throughout 2024. By the summer, CNN had laid off 100 people, and they're now reportedly planning to lay off hundreds more. Comcast may sell MSNBC. And neither of those developments should be surprising when you look at some of the cable news ratings.
To put it bluntly, they're a dumpster fire. According to Nielsen data, MSNBC is still down by more than half of what it was averaging up to election night. And CNN is down by slightly less than half, though it didn't have us for to fall because it was already at the bottom of the pack. And even though I will say both left and right are showing media distrust, so you do have to take that into account when you look at some of those numbers from polling outfits like Gallup.
You also have to take into account that Fox News's ratings are way up this year. They're now beating the ratings of the other cable news outlets combined, suggesting that a lot of former CNN and MSNBC viewers are flocking there. So I want to get into some of the major doozies that are likely driving a lot of the legacy media's poor performance. Just looking back at this year, what are some of the biggest standouts to you?
You know, for me, the biggest one wasn't an issue where there was clear deception or inaccuracy, but just some really appallingly callous coverage of the most momentous moment of the campaign. And that was the response to the attempt on President-elect Donald Trump's life at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13th. That very same night, ABC viewers heard George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raditz, in part blame the victim.
President Trump and his supporters have contributed to this violent rhetoric as well.
And then on the print front, the day after Butler, the Atlantic ran a piece that said that, and I'm quoting, the bloodshed Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. In September, of course, there was a second assassination attempt at Trump's golf course, and you heard similar rhetoric from major media. Almost immediately after news of that second assassination attempt broke, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt asked political analyst Elise Jordan this.
Do you expect to hear anything from the Trump campaign about toning down the rhetoric, toning down the violence, or would that be a typical of the former president? Well, Alex, remember back to the assassination attempt on President Trump's life and how there was talk of a new tone. And then the Republican convention was by Trumpian standards muted. And it did seem like he was just trying to take it down a few notches.
By the end of his convention speech, you know, we were kind of back to where we started. Also on that same night, we had this from NBC anchor Lester Holt. Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump has running made JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
And we need to remember that we're talking about the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. So you can imagine how this struck at least half of the country. And I have to imagine that people were probably watching who maybe didn't vote for Trump, but nonetheless found that kind of commentary troubling. And it's the kind of thing that I think is very hard to come back from because it's not a mistake. It's a level of bias that's a little more off-putting.
Right. Well, that brings to mind some of the media commentary we've heard just in the last few weeks regarding the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, just the minimizing of the crime and making light of it. So moving on to the second biggest fail of 2024. What's that?
Well, you know, I almost made this number one because it was such a systemic failure and involved such obvious deception. And that was the media's insistence throughout the spring and much of the summer that President Biden was not suffering from any mental infirmity. When it was pretty obvious to the American people that he was. So let's look at MSNBC. In June, anchor Nicole Wallace blamed the Biden appearances that were alarming the public on selectively edited clips.
There's a growing and insidious trend in right-wing media, broadcast, print, and social media. It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden directly from Republican National Committee's social media accounts and then use those videos to spread messages thoroughly to cast out on President Biden's Fitness for Office.
And we would take the hand-ringing by right-wing media about Biden's mental fitness in videos intentionally manipulated to make him look unfit, maybe a little more seriously, if there weren't radio silent about the repeated, glaring, and real mental lapses happening behind podiums and on camera on the part of Donald Trump.
It's interesting there that Wallace tried to claim that Trump was having the same kind of mental lapses, but those claims have disappeared now that the election is over. Wallace's colleague Joe Scarborough also sought to reassure his viewers that Biden was fine.
This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second, and I've known him for years. The presentees have known him for 50 years. If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it.
And I mean, the list of legacy outlets that dismissed the videos of Biden seeming lost and confused that Americans could see with their own eyes is a really long one. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the AP, NBC, they all called these videos cheap fakes.
meaning misleading edits of real video. And when Corinne John Pierre leaned into that narrative during the White House press briefings, it really did look like a collaborative effort between the media and the Biden administration. There seems to be a sort of rash of videos that have been edited to make the president appear, especially frail or mentally confused. I'm wondering if the White House is especially worried about the fact that this appears to be a pattern that we're seeing more about.
Yeah, and I think you all have called this the cheap fakes video. And that's exactly what they are. They are cheap fakes video. They are done in bad faith. And some of your news organization have been very clear, have stressed that these right wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because of the fact checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation.
Well, Biden's disastrous debate performance at the end of June made it impossible to deny his mental state and made it clear that he really had no chance of winning at that point. Then the coverage changed immediately and many media outlets began calling for him to step aside. Just one example, on June 21st, the New York Times ran a story which reported that any claims that Biden was suffering from diminished faculties were because of these cheap fakes.
But two weeks later, the day after the debate, they ran an editorial calling on him to step down due to his mental lapses. And this was really the pattern that you saw with the legacy outlets across the board. All right, now moving on to number three. What do you have there?
Well, I still don't think we can get away from the election yet because another glaring issue were the fact checks, especially during the debates. For instance, at the ABC debate between Trump and Harris, moderators David Muir and Lindsey Davis fact checked numerous times, including when Trump was generally correct. Like when he said, hard to believe they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. Davis broke in.
There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump. Now, this was a pretty semantic fact check, I think, because Harris's own running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, helped repeal a state law that required doctors to render medical aid to a baby that survives an abortion.
So in Minnesota, doctors can let born babies die. And that has happened in at least eight cases in that state. New York and Illinois also repealed laws that require medical care for babies that survive abortion. By the same token, ABC never fact checked Harris despite the fact that Harris made a number of false claims.
like saying that there were no members of the US military on active duty in a combat zone anywhere around the world. In fact, there are 3,000. After the same debate, Time Magazine wrote that Trump's claim that Harris supported funding sex changes for illegal immigrants was false. It wasn't. And Time later had to issue a correction. So that looked to a lot of people like glaring bias. And we did see something similar with NBC and the vice presidential debate.
Their moderator, Margaret Brennan, interrupted JD Vance as he was referencing undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status. Well, but thank you, Senator. We have so much to get to. I think it's important because we're going to turn out of the economy.
The rules were that you guys were going to fact check and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP1 app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years. Thank you, Senator.
of a legal immigration Margaret by our own leadership. Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. So again, a lot of viewers detected bias in that exchange. And then there were ethical issues in the media's favorable treatment of Harris. MSNBC host Al Sharpton, for instance, did not disclose that the Harris campaign made a $500,000 donation to his nonprofit right before he conducted a softball interview with the candidate.
Meanwhile, 60 Minutes was caught having edited their interview with Harris to make what were some pretty meandering, confusing answers to questions more comprehensible. CBS then ignored widespread calls to release the full transcript of the interview so that audiences could judge it for themselves.
So would you say most of these fails were related to the election? Well, definitely, because of course that dominated the news cycle for the year. But it wasn't exclusively election moments. When it came to the war in Gaza, major outlets had major egg on their faces when it was revealed that they'd been using inaccurate statistics provided by Hamas, which has of course been designated as a terrorist group by the US State Department.
outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, BBC, Reuters, AP, they all took data disseminated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas at face value, and they passed it along to their audiences. For instance, they reported fatality numbers for Palestinian women and children that a later study found were mathematically impossible. So in essence, you could say they aided Hamas' PR campaign.
This kind of credulity when it comes to war coverage led to a really embarrassing incident for CNN just recently here at the close of the year. On December 11th, the network ran a story from foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward in which she encountered a man in an empty Syrian prison. He told her he'd been detained by the Assad regime for months.
After three months in a windowless cell, he can finally see the sky. The rebel tells him there's no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints. Are you serious, he says? Syria is free, he tells him. It's the first time he has heard those words.
Well, when CNN posted the video to social media, users immediately pointed out how inauthentic the man's appearance and behavior seemed rather like something out of a low budget movie. And sure enough, within days, a Syrian fact checking site revealed that the man was really a former intelligence officer for the Assad government. And plenty of people rightly questioned why CNN didn't take more time verifying that man's identity before they rushed the story to air.
Now, have we seen any acknowledgement from some of these legacy medias about these kind of mistakes and what it's costing them with audiences?
You know, not so much from the journalistic class, though I will say Chris Saliza, formerly of CNN, did put out something of a maya culpa a few days ago. So in 2021, he said that Republicans trying to make Biden's mental capacity an issue were engaging in quote, lowest common denominator politics. But just this December 19th, he said this.
As a reporter, I have a confession to make. I should have pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden's mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline. So let me explain. Joe Biden was president from 2020 to 2024. I worked at CNN through 2022.
During that time, the early part when I was at CNN, 2020 to 2022, people would regularly, Republicans would regularly ping me and say, once you ask more questions to Joe Biden and how he's doing, he's 76, 77, 78-year-old man. And I would sort of brush them off because what I would say is, well, there's no
obvious evidence that he's declining. Yeah, he moves a little slower. He talks a little slower, but there's no evidence that he's declining. And the White House and the people around Joe Biden were absolutely adamant that suggesting anything, asking the question about whether he was in some physical, mental, or both decline was offensive. How could you?
It's age shaming. And I think that impacted me at some level, because while I did ask the question from time to time of, you know, not directly the White House, but AIDS and people around in that orbit, I didn't really push on it if I'm being honest.
And a couple of media owners have somewhat backtracked. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has promised that his paper is going to strive for more balanced coverage going forward, and so has the owner of the Los Angeles Times. But when it comes to those actually telling stories, I will say that their mayoculpas have mostly been forced.
Sonny Hostin, co-host on ABC's The View, for instance, had to read a legal disclaimer only a few weeks ago after some comments she made about Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. But I will leave you with one more media fail, Georgia. It's not the biggest of the year, but it is certainly the most expensive.
So back in March, during an interview with South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos made this claim about Donald Trump multiple times. You've endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. Except that wasn't true. And reportedly, Stephanopoulos's producer warned him repeatedly, including in writing, not to make that claim on the air.
Stephanopoulos did it anyway, Trump sued, and just a few days ago, ABC agreed to pay $16 million to settle. ABC and Stephanopoulos also issued a joint statement saying that they regret the anchor statements regarding President Donald J. Trump. Well, in light of some of these numbers and just coming into this new year, it'll be interesting to see if some of these papers and outlets decide to turn over a new leave. Meghan, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
