Trust in the media has long been a problem for mainstream media. The latest scandal from the LA Times probably won’t help the mainstream media’s cause.
There’s been countless studies showing that trust in the media is hitting rock bottom. There are plenty of factors that got us to this point. This includes the abandonment of facts, publishing articles that push an agenda that the owners feel is in their interest, distorting reality for the sake of sounding like your neutral (re: sane washing Trump), constantly bashing technology, spreading misinformation and disinformation, and so on and so forth.
Some people out there think that this is simply bashing the journalists working the front lines, but frequently, a lot of these problems can be sourced to the ownership of these media outlets. Sure, there are journalists out there that are absolutely terrible at their jobs, but a bigger problem revolves around intervention from ownership. It’s one thing to see one journalist pushing an obvious falsehood, but when seemingly every journalist is pushing the same falsehood (such as the lie that platforms are stealing news content), that is a sign that there is a more systemic problem as opposed to one journalist publishing falsehoods knowingly or not.
Indeed, if the media companies ownership is intervening in the coverage of their journalists, then that is very corrosive to the trust the media outlet enjoys. How can you trust the coverage when the owners are working to silence criticisms to a particular viewpoint regardless of validity?
This is all things I have been suspecting for years now, but the problem is is that it sounds conspiratorial in nature. While I’ve established patterns to suggest something deeper is going on, I didn’t have the smoking gun some people demand. After all, if all of this was really going on, you’d see resignations from a number of the journalists, right? Well, back in October, that is exactly what happened. Several high profile resignations rocked the LA Times following the controversy of the papers owner blocking the political endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Washington Post faced a very similar allegations after that papers owner blocked a similar endorsement.
From there, the scandal grew with Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, defending his move to silence his own journalists. The explanation was complete nonsense and contradictory on a number of fronts. This includes saying that he is proud of his world class journalists and how his team is second to none, yet at the same time, arguing his team is left on auto-pilot and that intervention on his part is needed. Like, what is it? Does he have a world class team of journalists or is his journalists simply on auto-pilot? It’s one or the other.
From there, the scandal grew to even more spectacular proportions. A long time cartoonist working for the Washington Post also publicly resigned after her political cartoon got censored by the papers ownership. The cartoon criticized Mark Zuckerberg, Disney, Jeff Bezos, and LA Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, kissing up to Trump by offering money and worshipping at Trump’s feet. It’s a perfectly valid criticism since these figures have been working hard to kiss the Trump ring for months now in an effort to win political favours.
Not to be outdone, LA Times owner, Soon-Shiong, also announced a speech crackdown on his paper as well. In that crackdown, Soon-Shiong said that he is going to be personally reviewing the headlines of Op-Eds to make sure that they don’t upset Trump.
Today, we are learning that Soon-Shiong’s interventions in headlines are going far beyond just meddling with his op-eds headlines. As it turns out, he is going so far as to completely re-write said op-eds to the point where the meaning has been completely changed.
In this case, Eric Reinhart submitted an op-ed offering a scathing critique of RFK Jr. as well as the US healthcare system. Basically, he condemned the appointment and offered his reasoning of why his appointment is so bad. However, the editorial was completely altered before publication to suggest that US Healthcare is a mess and RFK Jr. is seemingly the right man for the job to fix it. In short, the polar opposite of what the original author was trying to get at. Reinhart, for his part, published his original version elsewhere and the story blew up from there. From TechDirt:
As Reinhart points out, the Times didn’t just soften his criticism – they systematically stripped out his core arguments against RFK Jr. and slapped on a misleading headline that completely reversed his intended message.
The extent of the LA Times’ manipulation becomes clear when comparing the published version to Reinhart’s originally submitted op-ed (titled “RFK Jr.s Wrecking Ball Won’t Fix Public Health“). While the published version presents a sanitized critique of healthcare, the original piece drew sharp parallels between RFK Jr. and Luigi Mangione’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — a comparison the Times completely excised.
But perhaps the most damning edit — made just before Soon-Shiong would falsely present the piece as pro-Kennedy — was the removal of this devastating critique at the closing of the piece:
Although RFK Jr. and Luigi Mangione are both responses to the same underlying problem of US healthcare corruption, there is a major difference between them: one operated outside the law to kill one person in defense of millions, whereas the other––via his egomaniacal disregard for scientific evidence––seeks to use law itself to inflict preventable death on those millions.
Let that sink in: Reinhart explicitly warned that RFK Jr’s appointment could lead to the “preventable death” of “millions” — and the LA Times not only stripped this warning from the piece, it then used the neutered version to advocate for Kennedy’s appointment.
This isn’t editorial oversight — it’s literary gaslighting.
This is about as damning as it gets. It goes far beyond simply editing the headlines to appease the Trump administration. The above showcases that whole pieces are going to get reworked to be as pro-Trump administration as possible regardless of what the original author had intended. We’re not talking about running a piece through a fact check and ensuring accuracy. We’re talking about completely altering the meaning for political purposes and attributing it to the original author afterwards.
You want a reason why people are losing trust in the mainstream media? Well, here is a perfect shining example of this. So much for the major media outlets being a bastion of free speech.
