Journalists are Eroding Their Own Credibility

Journalism is supposed to be about reporting facts not writing misleading stories about those one disagrees with politically.

Within my first week as a journalism student at Penn State, I was taught the old media adage that reporters should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That certainly seems noble on the face of it, but for some reason it bothered me. Shouldn’t the agenda of the reporter be to bring facts and the truth to light, no matter who is comforted or afflicted?

Nevertheless, I didn’t pay it too much mind. I figured that any reporter would assume all this comforting and afflicting should be done using the truth rather than fabrications or misrepresentations.

Every day I learn how wrong I was.

Just look at what happened in Poland the other day. President Trump and his wife were meeting that country’s president and first lady. Poland’s first lady reached out to shake her counterpart’s hand while the two heads of state shook hands. Mr. Trump finished his handshake with the president a tad early and when he reached out to shake the Polish first lady’s hand, his arm lingered for a second before she grasped it.

When watching the exchange in its entirety, it appears completely normal. However, if you dishonestly cut the video at just the right spot, it looks like Poland’s first lady dissed Mr. Trump by leaving him hanging and instead only paying attention to his wife. It’s not surprising that somebody cut the video that way. For every Pepe the frog on the alt-right trolling Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, there’s a member of the resistance doing the exact same thing. What was shocking was how the media gleefully distributed the clip.