Yup…a CNN journalist tweeted out a lie , let it go viral, then came back later and said he made it up, but we “know” it’s true.
A trustworthy news organization would fire a reporter who did this immediately. CNN has not and will not, because CNN is not a trustworthy organization.
On a related track, Matt Laszlo, a journalist who works at The Daily Beast and NPR, tweeted,
With 9 in 10 Republicans reporting having lost faith in the media (because Trump’s rhetoric has worked), I argue it’s time for newspapers to rethink their relationships with readers and end endorsements now
Conservative columnist Charlie Martin caught it, and correctly noted (in an excellent piece about mainstream media bias that echos many posts on Ethics Alarms),
…what struck me was his explanation: “because Trump’s rhetoric has worked.” I’ve written about the record of unreliability, mendacity, and flat-out lies by the media about Trump, going back to my first “Stop Making Me Defend Trump” article on Inauguration Day to my recent VIP article “Why Don’t Americans Trust the Media?” There are too many examples to enumerate here, from the Times‘ report that Trump “lied” about being “wiretapped” when they had reported the wiretapping on the front page, to the 111 examples Sharyl Attkisson has accumulated over the last three years. (It’s 111 at last count — it was only 106 when I wrote the “don’t trust the media” piece in December.)
Journalists lie outright in public as their employers and editors shrug and do nothing, and then accuse the President of being responsible for the fact that the public no longer trusts journalists.
Ethics Alarms 
I think we’re seeing a backlash to “the resistance” in two forms.
One is as Matt Laszlo’s article points out, rank and file on the right are unified in their belief that the traditional media is devoid of any credibility whatsoever. (Although I do question who the one in ten are that still have faith in the media… I guess the fervently never Trump?)
The second is that we’re seeing a unification of the Republican party unlike any in my lifetime. I think the democrats have been lockstep for far longer. McConnell and Graham have been considered sellout wimps for years. No more.
This is going to be yet another over-reach that will backfire.
“McConnell and Graham have been considered sellout wimps for years”
Still are. We trust them as far as we could throw an elephant. Nice that they see personal gain in supporting the Right, for now, but it will take a lot longer track record to prove to conservatives that they are not a part of the Swamp: GOP establishment elitists (GOPe) who work for their personal gain and power.
Despondency is what remains in me after seeing what the left’s treachery has wrought. A nation hopelessly divided by an endless phalanx of lies.
While a majority of us may see it and return a flawed President to office who stands athwart these liars and their seditious plans, what follows will very likely be a national version of riots following social justice warriors not getting their way in the courts. Where it goes from there is the stuff of nightmares unseen in over 150 years.
Jim, I, too, am despondent. Our educational system has been taken over by left wing flakes, our news media has sold their souls and Republican Conservatives are attacked physically while at dinner. I am afraid that the inmates have truly taken over the asylum and our great Experiment has failed. With luck, I won’t live to see the end of this, but my grand children and great-grand children surely will. I fear for them.
I wouldn’t worry too much. Personally, I’m glad they’re losing patience and spoiling for a fight. That bit of nonsense will be firmly, decisively, and permanently put down by the grown-ups when THEY finally get good and pissed. So, SO much better for it to come to a head, than for it to simmer, until they’ve indoctrinated all sanity out of existence.
Not all pain is a curse.
A police officer caught in a lie can no longer do his job, because no one will believe him when he testifies. A lawyer who knowingly lies will lose his license. If this guy had put the two tweets together as one, he might be ok, as just a snide aside saying “I bet this is what they’re thinking.” Still not appropriate for someone whose job is to report the facts, but it would probably be a protected statement of opinion or belief. This guy, whose job it is to tell the truth, told a blatant lie, saying Senators were somewhere they weren’t and said something they didn’t say, then let it sit out there for seven, count ’em, seven hours, the equivalent of many people’s workday if we allow an hour for lunch, then tweeted that this was a lie, but everyone here knows that’s what they said.
Sixteen years ago CBS sacked Mary Mapes and pushed Dan Rather into “retirement” ahead of schedule because they took some sketchy information that turned out to be fake and ran with it in the hopes of bringing down GWB in the 2004 election. This guy openly lies, and no one even blinks? To paraphrase the speech (actually a rant) by George Galloway that the whole left thought was so damn great when he delivered it against Norm Coleman, I know standards have slipped in the last few years in the industry, but for a journalist, this guy is remarkably cavalier with any idea of the truth.
Then other journalists have the audacity to say the public doesn’t believe them because of the president’s rhetoric? Truly, the journalism industry inhabits a separate reality.
Joe Lockhart is not a journalist or a reporter he’s an analyst or a contributor. That said; a person like Joe Lockhart who is willing to literally make up biased lies like that to feed into the bias of those that follow him on Twitter doesn’t belong presenting anything to the public on CNN even as an analyst, he simply cannot be trusted.
Because of Trump’s rhetoric? No, they did it to themselves, and it didn’t start just four years ago. The self-inflicted foot-shootings and face-punchings started decades ago. I was a journalist (Army) in the Seventies, but I couldn’t be one now…I would lose either my self-respect or my job.
Thanks for your service… from one grunt to another
I think it might be useful to have the equivalent of a “news aggregator” for these transgressions against truthful commentary and journalism. I wonder what the response would be if all these examples that led the decline in trustworthiness of the media were able to be aggregated into one site where the culprit, example, and employer are identified.
I believe this crap continues because such examples are diffused throughout the media and thus get hidden in the forest of information we face daily. If we started collating these examples in one location a critical mass might occur and things might change.
This is a start: https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/01/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
So at Christmas time there was a funny tweet…
This account was suspended for fake news. This is not the only time, I have seen several stories of late about twitter and Instagram fact checking, and blocking sarcasm and memes. Another notable one was when some photographer took a picture in Death Valley or something and re-touched the picture to show colors in the sand, that got blocked as well. (https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/instagram-is-busy-fact-checking-memes-and-rainbow-hills-while-leaving-political-lies-alone/)
How is it that this guy can just outright lie, and that is fine. I cannot stomach this double standard anymore.
So the link to the tweet did not attach correctly. I am not sure how to insert an image into these posts, but here is the URL: https://img.ifunny.co/images/72d2f44b8a58c201bbcfca1c9694426129d44ddf15e3730b4aa2ae6234eb1dda_1.jpg
Worked for me… thanks
The Quora question posed was: Should a reporter that tweets out a very international lie (a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive) be fired? The question provided a link to this very blog post about Joe Lockhart.
One of the answers to the question posted was presented by Diana Lucas, who claims to have studied Journalism at Western Washington University…
I replied with this…
Diana replied…
I think this Diana’s comment represents a silent voice that’s not being heard on Ethics Alarms and I think it warrants discussion here on Ethics Alarms.
Except that her comment isn’t even close to valid argument. These are the typical rationalizations: not EVERY report is false, not every journalist is biased. It’s the exact opposite: if there is no way to know when reporters alr lying and biased, then the field has no credibility, and has failed its basic ethics test. I was pretty clear: if CNN allows journalist who lie to continue working there, then CNN cannot be trusted, because it won’t insist on journalism’s ethics. Then she defaults top the lazy, dumb, insulting Hitler Big Lie. And this: “There is this pervasive, and incorrect, idea that main stream media is a tool for democrats” is proff of dishonesty or stupidity, and I don’t care which. Statistics show that over 95% of all reporters and editors are Democrats and progressives. The bias for Obama in both elections was screamingly obvious, and documented by neutral sources like the Pew Foundation. Over 95% of all mainstream media news about Trump is negative, despite various accomplishments. Against this she puts the fact that Brian Williams was fired…and then hired again by NBC subsidiary MSNBC?
I’d be happy to shoot the fish in a barrel that is Diana and others like her, but I’m looking for smart, informed commenters who don’t misrepresent what’s written here and use straw men, like saying anyone argues that every reporter lies all the time.