“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

The media once knew how to do this. The best example is the Richard Jewell story. In 1996, after Jewell, a security guard, discovered a bomb at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and helped clear the crowd, he was declared a hero by the press.  Days later, reporter Kathy Scruggs was told by a law enforcement source that Jewell was the FBI’s foremost suspect. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran the story that made Jewell the villain. CNN reported the AJC article, and for the next 88 days, Jewell was hunted by reporters. He was one of the first victims of what would become known as “trial by media.” When his name was finally cleared, Jewell, who died in 2007, sued the New York Post, NBC News, and CNN and settled with all three. 

In what today would be considered an astonishing move, CNN producer Henry Schuster actually wrote an apology to Jewell: “I made Richard Jewell famous — and ruined his life.”

Imagine a journalist in 2024 having this kind of integrity and self-reflection. Russiagate, the Covington Catholic students, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservatives who sounded the alarm about President Joe Biden’s health years ago and were mocked, the child who dressed up in face paint for the Kansas City Chiefs and was accused of using blackface — the list of those wronged by the press is long. Yet reporters now seem sociopathic, incapable of remorse or human feeling. They won’t ever simply apologize.

Bingo, though I do not think they are sociopathic. Journalists are so absorbed in ideological fervor now, and so convinced of their own virtue, that they believe the words of Capt. Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon: “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.”

Another problem with Judge’s recommendation is that most, if not all, of the worst unethical conduct by the news media aren’t mistakes at all, but deliberate. The current scandal regarding Biden’s dementia is certainly in this category. If they are sorry at all, they are only sorry they got caught.

They also never learned the basics of journalism ethics or ethics generally, and are, as a group, not very bright. Apologizing for a single bad decision, misdeed or mistake is a lot easier than apologizing for being lousy at your job.