Within an hour of the first reports of shots fired in the Capital Gazette building, numerous media pundits took it upon themselves to blame the shooting on Trump’s rhetoric about “fake news.†A Reuters reporter accused the president of having blood on his hands, followed by similar accusations from a New York Times journalist, a White House correspondent, an investigative reporter from Politico, and other high-profile media personalities.
They were completely, unequivocally wrong.
The suspect wasn’t motivated by political ideology, but by a longstanding feud with the newspaper that predates Trump’s election by roughly four years. Had these journalists waited for the facts of the situation to come out, they could have avoided looking exactly like the “fake news†media the president has accused them of being.
Instead, they’re having to backtrack and justify irrational statements. That’s not an easy job, and often requires a bit of humility.
On the other hand, simply dropping the story as fast as possible is much more convenient.
---------------------------------------------------------------
No. Journalists today never wait for facts, because they don't care if what they are saying is true or not. They do not care. Their goal is to capture the moment and inject their agenda into the emotion of the scene. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant. They can always spew propaganda while people are emotional and enraged, and then backtrack later with some buried feeble retraction. They do it all the time, very intentionally. The news today is no longer about news, or truth, or what really happened. Today news is all propaganda to push the Leftist agenda and truth be damned.
