Trust, but Verify.

We all like a good story.  It is in our nature.  However, we all know that it is important to verify if the story is true or not before we take any action based on the story.

Historically, the role of the mainstream media was to help us by showing if the official narrative was true or not.  The image of the journalist was a non-partisan person searching for and uncovering facts that were relevant for determining if the official narrative was true or false.

Unfortunately, this image no longer reflects reality.  As Matt Taibbi put it:

The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. There’s no risk in being wrong within a prevailing narrative. That’s why the chief offenders kept perches or failed up. The job isn’t about getting facts right, it’s about getting narratives right, and being willing to eat errors discovered in service of pushing the right subtext.

Failure to self-audit after Iraq led the media business to mangle of a series of subsequent stories. From the still-misreported financial crisis of 2008 to the failure to take the rise of Donald Trump as an electoral phenomenon seriously to the increasingly sloppy coverage of our hyper-aggressive foreign policies, we’ve gotten very loose with facts and data, knowing there’s no downside to certain kinds of misses.