Is Legacy Media Finally Ready to Admit Its Honesty Problem?

Does legacy television news have a future? For a variety of reasons, it seems unlikely. Most of those reasons boil down to this: Americans just don’t trust the establishment media. But if veteran newsman Tony Dokoupil’s recent monologue on this subject is any indication, the industry still isn’t prepared to acknowledge that it has sacrificed public trust for the sake of advancing liberal partisan narratives.

Let’s give him one-and-a-half cheers, however. Dokoupil is at least willing to say out loud that very few people trust his network, CBS News, or the rest of the legacy media. Dokoupil is set to start as a new anchor for CBS on Monday.

In his admission of guilt, Dokoupil confessed that he has had “thousands of conversations” with ordinary Americans, from his mom’s West Virginia neighbors to his own New York neighborhood, to countless other spots in the country, about what Americans think legacy news has misreported. He listed a few of the topics: NAFTA, the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton’s emails, COVID-19 lockdowns, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and “the president’s fitness for office.”

It’s a pretty thorough list, to be honest. The media indeed screwed up all of these stories, to the detriment of the country.

Dokoupil’s explanation of what went wrong, however (in other words, why the media failed to report these stories accurately) is the reason he cannot receive even two cheers. “On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” he said. “Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”

Politically speaking, one can see why he wants to frame this media bias as a matter of “elites,” “academics,” and “advocates” versus ordinary Americans.

That explanation has some truth to it. During the height of COVID, legacy journalists kept telling Americans all sorts of myths about lockdowns, masks, the susceptibility of children to the disease, and much more. All of these were sold as “The Science.” A parade of “academics” and “experts” were brought forth to scold all those who cast doubt on whatever new commandments were being brought down from the mountain by Tony Fauci. 

The more important truth, however, is this: on COVID and all the other stories Dokoupil mentioned, there were elites and experts who could and did contradict these narratives. Medical researchers such as Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Scott Atlas were all vocal critics of the approaches and conclusions of the public health apparatus in the early days of the pandemic. Academics like these three, affiliated with Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and many other prestigious medical and scientific organizations, were treated as cranks.

The reality is that there are always elites and even academics (though fewer of the latter because the academy has become actively hostile toward anyone right-of-center) willing to give assessments on a variety of topics that are contrary to the establishment narrative.

But to the legacy media, these were the wrong elites and academics. These other, disfavored academics and elites were advocating the wrong points.

What were the “right” points? This question brings us to Dokoupil’s third category of media talking heads: “advocates.” Nobody objects to the media giving a platform to advocates. People curious about stories want to know what the people who have vested interests in them will say and how they will spin things. Again, however, the problem with the legacy media is that only advocates of particular views are allowed to speak.

What Dokoupil fails to admit is that the media did not just “miss” the truth about stories like Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop. They actively and consciously suppressed facts and views that conflicted with their own preferred narrative.

The real problem with legacy news organizations is that Americans can see that decisions about what to cover and how to cover it are nakedly partisan. In all of the examples Dokoupil cites, whether the media covered each story was determined using this analysis: 1.) whether a story hurts the Republicans and their allies, and 2.) whether it helps the Democrats and their allies. To give one prominent example, former CBS journalist Catherine Herridge recently spoke about her own investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop. Nearly two years after social media and legacy media went along with the “expert” view that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” Herridge had done the work of a journalist in investigating it. It was certainly not disinformation. The laptop was real and certainly Biden’s. And it had some atrocious information about Hunter and his father.

But Herridge’s damning revelations were buried because they could hurt the Democrats and thus help Republicans. “When we did the story, we did it after the [2022] midterms,” she said. “I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms, and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”

This is the reality that we all know. Dokoupil knows it, too. He might as well admit it, instead of hinting around.

Are there reasons for hope? I think there might be. In October, Dokoupil challenged Senator Elizabeth Warren to her face about her denial that Democrats want to give taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits to illegal aliens. In November, he interviewed New York Fire Department commissioner Robert S. Tucker, who announced his resignation because of Zohran Mamdani’s electoral victory. 

To his credit, Dokoupil hasn’t been following the political criteria for reporting. Nor has he been paying attention to “ordinary Americans” versus “elites” and “academics,” as parts of his speech might imply. Instead, he’s just trying to do something he mentions at the end of his speech: “telling the truth.” Sure, his reporting still contains some things for conservatives to gripe about. But acknowledging that the media has lost the trust of the public and needs to work to gain it back is a start.

If the legacy media survives and finds a way to thrive, it will be because more reporters and executives decide to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – and because they decide that the truth is more important than propping up the Democrat Party.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.