As a fellow columnist at the Daily pointed out a couple weeks ago, many people, the majority of which are U.S. adults, find that news media is biased, and nearly half of the adult population finds the news to be inaccurate. I agree with the survey she listed, but I will go further. Journalism, as a discipline and all the different offshoots the field encompasses, is tainted in practice, primarily at the top “elite” publications or organizations. Anyway, the higher-level publications of media are tainted with what seems to be an inherent elitism and arrogance that not only annoys the average American but also produces the ever-glaring biases and inaccuracies within the work that is produced. I will relate only a few of the most recent conspicuous examples of elitist, arrogant and inaccurate journalism.

Don Lemon of CNN and his colleagues are elitist to the extreme. Only last week, Lemon laughed uncontrollably when two of his guests moved from insulting President Donald Trump to anyone who supports the president, or seemingly, anyone who is not of the “elite” ilk. The guests used Southern accents and proceeded to mock and mimic Trump supporters and non-“elites” with phrases in a back and forth dialogue:

“You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling,” 

“Your math and your reading,”

“Yeah, your reading, your geography, knowing other countries, sipping your latte,”

“All those lines on the map,”

“Only those elitists know where Ukraine is.”

Lemon offered a “non-apology” apology, claiming he was not belittling anyone. 

CNN’s journalists failed almost exactly a year ago with the Covington Catholic school fiasco in Washington D.C. CNN covered the incident in such a way that portrayed MAGA hat-wearing high schooler Nicholas Sandmann as a racist instigator as he got in the face of Native American activist Nathan Phillips.

After dragging Sandmann and Covington Catholic school and students through the media on their shows, additional footage shows that exactly the opposite occurred that day. Fast forward to earlier this month, and CNN settled an undisclosed but certainly large defamation lawsuit with Sandmann. It turns out that maybe journalists and the media, instead of trying to be first, fierce, and provocative in their headlines and deadlines, should try to simply do their actual job properly and ethically.

Let us move to the New York Times. Last year, the Times released the 1619 Project to commemorate 400 years of African slavery in America. The essays and material released, however, came under the scrutiny of trained, prestigious period-historians of America and of slavery. 

Several historians penned a letter concerned about the historical method and veracity of several claims made within the work. Essentially, the historians charged the journalists with not fully understanding the historiographical arguments that have and are still taking place about slavery.

The Times editorial board and journalists responded saying no corrections needed to be made and that “We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?…The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at the magazine, has consistently used history to inform her journalism, primarily in her work on educational segregation….” Nikole Hannah-Jones added on twitter, in response to criticism from historians such as James McPherson, “LOL. Right, because white historians have produced truly objective history.”

Journalistic arrogance to the extreme. There is little doubt why the historians in their letter wrote, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Of course, the Times disagreed.

Journalists are not historians, they are not experts in the vast subjects they discuss, nor is the media at large simply experts because they have a forum. Add in a deadline, ideology and extreme competition to be “first” and you have the modern mainstream media in America, and the content is often incomplete, inaccurate, lazy, elementary and biased.