Journalist Matt Taibbi said on Friday that many legacy newsrooms adopted a Trump-era model that has eroded public trust and “hurt” their reputations.
In an appearance on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Taibbi explained that during former President Trump’s time in the White House, mainstream media gradually moved away from reporting objectively on politics and moved to a model where it opposed Trump.
“[T]hat was expressed by people like Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times who said that basically Donald Trump is a big enough threat that we have to be true to history’s judgment and that meant opposing him,” Taibbi told host Saagar Enjeti.
“What we ended up happening in the Trump years was, the mainstream press was almost uniformly about negative news about Donald Trump and then there was Fox News and the other side. And that’s basically our media landscape, it’s two separate camps of basically political propaganda, which I think has hurt the news media’s reputation.”
He continued, stating that several stories reported by newsrooms including the Times and CNN were later found to have poor sourcing or were found to be untrue.
“What we found out was that there were a lot of stories out there like this. There was a before version of a story and then an after version that kind of contradicted,” Taibbi said. “There were lots and lots of these stories and that undermines the ability of people to have confidence in the news media even if they can’t stand Donald Trump.”
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