Part 1 of Attkisson’s lecture. Part 2 is below.
Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy-award winning investigative journalist, gave a presentation recently calling out the lack of integrity in today’s news media. She assailed specifically, the way in which the media pursued stories about President Trump during his presidency.
“This movement, I think, was designed specifically in part, to keep President Trump from serving his full term, or if that failed, to impact the 2020 race,” she asserted.
The strategy relied heavily on “slanted journalism,” Attkisson says, that required major news outlets to suspend normal ethics and guidelines. “Which astonishingly enough, they did, unabashedly. And admitted to it, outright, saying that it was necessary to change the way we do business because President Trump was so uniquely dangerous.”
Attkisson highlighted numerous examples over the last several years in which, she says, the mainstream media failed to observe even the most fundamental of journalistic norms.
She highlighted a 2017 article by NYU professor of journalism Mitchell Stephens in which he celebrated the interjection of partisanship into news reporting.
“The big news is that many of our best journalists seem, in news coverage, not just opinion pieces, to be moving away from balance and nonpartisanship,” Stephens wrote.
“Is this the end of all that is good and decent in American journalism? Nah. I say good for them. An abandonment of the pretense to ‘objectivity’—in many ways a return to American journalism’s roots—is long overdue.”
She analyzed another Politico story published at the height of the Covid19 pandemic in 2020 that claimed President Trump owed the Bank of China tens of millions dollars. The headline and story seemed to imply there was no way a U.S. president would be able to guide the country through such a perilous time while beholden to the country the crisis originated in.
After the story is shown to be false – the Bank of China put out a statement saying it held the Trump loan for only 22 days before selling it to a U.S. real estate firm in 2012 – Politico simply changes a word in the headline but keeps the story, and the narrative it was pushing, largely the same.
“There are so many of these mistakes. It starts to look like a pattern, a strategy against Trump,” Attkisson says. “Not just sloppy mistakes. And I tracked the major media mistakes and never found one that favored Trump. That starts to look like a pattern, too.”
She also details an NBC article from 2018 that claimed President Trump was the first president since 2002 not to visit U.S. troops serving overseas during Christmastime. When it was learned that President Trump was en route to visit troops in Iraq on the afternoon of Christmas Day, 2018, NBC, failed to retract the story, bizarrely parsing the definition of “Christmastime” instead.
“As of the end of Christmas Day 2018, Trump had not visited troops during the holiday season, and had announced no plans to do so. The article was correct, but on Dec. 26, the situation changed,” the Editor’s Note on the article reads.
“We are also altering one line in the article, as well as the headline, to be more specific and to note that Trump was the first president since 2002 who didn’t visit military personnel on or before Christmas, rather than at Christmastime,” it adds.
Will a more robust alternative media landscape emerge from this or will we be relegated to this very limited narrative for fear of being cancelled, an audience member asks Attkisson after her presentation.
“We have to work really hard not to be bullied out of being Americans. And being heard, whatever we think, and whatever we feel,” Attkisson replies. “Particularly when you’re talking about the election, to criminalize feelings and thoughts…to be treated like, or told, that you’re practically a criminal for thinking that, or for expressing that. This is a very dangerous thing. And I hope we don’t allow it.”
In a statement to ITN, Professor Stephens defended his stance and his article, saying in part, “in calling in that Politico article for an end to the pretense of objectivity in American journalism I also state that ‘our best reporters must still dig and keep digging, check and double-check as they investigate. They must still be fair to those they cover and give credit or blame where due.’”
But, he said, “the barrage of untruths – as is apparent to just about anyone bothering to check his facts – President Trump unleashed before, during and now after his presidency made it incumbent upon any journalist attempting to be fair and truthful to call out, not just repeat, such untruths.”
ITN also reached out to Newsweek’s Jessica Kwong, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, Politico and NBC News for reaction to Attkisson’s critiques and comments. We will update this posting if and when we receive any additional responses.