The Washington Post (7/13/18) fails to examine corporate media’s contribution to declining standards of truth.
Carlos Lozada, the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, promised “an honest investigation” of whether truth can survive the Trump administration in the lead article in the paper’s Sunday Outlook section. He delivered considerably less.
Most importantly and incredibly, Lozada never considers the possibility that respect for traditional purveyors of “truth” has been badly weakened by the fact that they have failed to do so in many important ways in recent years. Furthermore, they have used their elite status (prized university positions and access to major media outlets) to deride those who challenged them as being unthinking illiterates.
This dynamic is most clear in the trade policy pursued by the United States over the last four decades. This policy had the predicted and actual effect of eliminating the jobs of millions of manufacturing workers and reducing the pay of tens of millions of workers with less than a college education. The people who suffered the negative effects of these policies were treated as stupid know-nothings, and wrongly told that their suffering was due to automation or was an inevitable product of globalization. (Yes, I am once again plugging my [free] book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)
These claims are what those of us still living in the world of truth know as “lies,” but you will never see anyone allowed to make these points in the Washington Post. After all, its readers can’t be allowed to see such thoughts.
This was far from the only major failure of the purveyors of truth. The economic crisis caused by the collapse of the housing bubble cost millions of workers their jobs and/or houses. While this collapse was 100 percent predictable for anyone with a basic knowledge of economics, with almost no exceptions, our elite economists failed to see it coming, and ridiculed those who warned of the catastrophe.
Incredibly, there were no career consequences for this momentous failure. No one lost their job and probably few even missed a scheduled promotion. Everyone was given a collective “who could have known?” amnesty. This leaves us with the absurd situation where a dishwasher who breaks the dishes get fired, a custodian that doesn’t clean the toilet gets fired, but an elite economist who completely misses the worst economic disaster in 70 years gets promoted to yet another six-figure salary position.
And, departing briefly from my area of expertise, none of the geniuses who thought invading Iraq was a good idea back in 2003 seems to be on the unemployment lines today. Again, there was another collective “who could have known?” amnesty, with those responsible for what was quite possibly the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history still considered experts in the area and drawing high salaries.
When we have a world in which the so-called experts are not held accountable for their failures, even when they are massive, and they consistently look down on the people who question their expertise, it undermines belief in truth. It would have been nice if Lozada had explored this aspect of the issue, but, hey, it’s the Washington Post.
A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (7/15/18).
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” an admonition
Or an aspiration?
Exactly right. WaPo and the rest of the mainstream media have no accountability for anything they do, be it slander, defamation, bearing false witness, outright deceit. It’s performance during the Bush and especially the Obama administration caused many people to feel betrayed to the point of losing interest in what the media had to say.
The turning point for me was when Ben Rhodes thanked the media for their echoing and amplifying even made up things in their support for the Iran deal. I spent some time as a reporter and if anyone called me an echo and amplifier I would have shown them new meanings of the words. These toadies blushed and basked in their loss of professional identity. The news media are well-paid flacks for the left. I think the only reason all these news outlets that say the same thing continue to survive is that their backers don’t want anyone else to take their place.
The news media flacks represents their owners which are more on the right.
Great posting by Dean Baker, pointing-out the economic paradigm (ie; globalization) that the MSM promotes endlessly nowadays. As a left-liberal/progressive (whatever the hell people want to call me), I have to admit that I stopped listening/reading the MSM and often started voting Green Party when Bill Clinton signed-off on NAFTA, pushed-through ‘welfare reform’, and started bombing the Balkans. And, as DB correctly mentions above, W’s Iraq ‘War’ (invasion) was SOOOooo obviously — and well-documented — a lie/war of aggression, that even the war-hawk Republicans by-and-large backed away from it. (One of the few things that surprised me about that whole episode was that the US did NOT find even a small vial or two of leftover chemical weapons — I thought they might even plant them!)
As someone who lived through the Vietnam War, the Reagan Contra affair, W’s Iraq War, etc, I thought that my fellow US voters would — like myself — develop more skepticism about these sort of MAJOR ethical decisions, but I’ve been sorely disappointed on that point.
I was born in America….. but it’s been chopped up and changed so much—-that I am left with living in ICA–that’s what’s left of AMERica and Truth, and Honesty —and all those elected officials who don’t know US history and the Constitution ——-so Good bye Glass-Steggal, and 4th Amendment and the 1st too. A lot of . Congress has 2 jobs it seems; citizen representative and lobbyist; the military upper level has 2 jobs too, war and becoming a Fox spokesperson, and the citizens seem to be regulated by moving to twitter and porno. I really miss the America I grew up in———–gone but not forgotten–that really doesn’t cut it though. I often wonder, what will become of us in the nation of ICA where twitter is the medium and the message.