In fact, I think nothing makes people lose trust in news organizations as much as when they’ve seen something with their own eyes -- and then see news coverage that doesn’t comport with what they themselves experienced.
Case in point: Legacy media coverage of the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent earlier this week.
Millions of people watched the video that clearly shows that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three driving an SUV, was not the aggressor.
And yet – because the constantly lying Trump administration is insisting against all evidence that she was -- the coverage treats that like a debatable point.
Why would you trust a news organization that doesn’t have the integrity and the guts to state an obvious truth?
Trump wrote on Truth Social that the driver “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” and “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
That was palpably untrue.
Kristi Noem instantly declared Good a “domestic terrorist” who “attempted to ram” ICE agents.
That was untrue and vile.
Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the shooting was the “result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”
That was untrue, addled, and pernicious.
But to our major newsrooms, the truth of the matter is a jump ball.
Wednesday’s live coverage on the Washington Post website was headlined “Officials dispute Noem’s claims after woman fatally shot by ICE in Minneapolis.”
The New York Times coverage on Wednesday evening was headlined “Minnesota Officials Dispute Federal Accounts of Fatal ICE shooting.”
Another Times story was headlined “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test.”
The Times’s most recent article, as of this writing, is about how “[d]isputes between Minnesota officials and the Trump administration intensified Thursday.” It doesn’t say who is right. It says “Officials have described the killing of Ms. Good in starkly different terms.”
As it happens, the Times’s crack video investigative team published a must-see analysis on Thursday under the headline “Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis.” The footage, they concluded, “appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired three shots at close range.”
That was terrific reporting.
But the Times’s political journalists treated their own newsroom’s analysis as just another party heard from, writing:
Administration officials, including President Trump, defended the shooting as lawful, saying that the agent who fired was acting in self-defense. City and state officials described those accounts as “propaganda” and “garbage.”
A video analysis shows that the woman’s vehicle appeared to be turning away from the officer as he opened fire.
(The Washington Post also did a frame-by-frame analysis, lamely concluding that it “raises questions” about the accounts from Trump and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.)
The Associated Press this afternoon is still apparently flummoxed, reporting that Noem and Trump have “cast Good as a villain, suggesting she used her vehicle as a weapon to attack the officer who shot her,” while “state and local officials and protesters rejected that characterization.”
To be clear, what the headlines should have said – and should be saying – is that the video shows Trump and others are lying.
How can you possibly trust a news organization that falsely equates obvious, epic gaslighting with the saw-it-with-your-own-eyes truth?
You can’t and you shouldn’t.
