It's not news that people today on both left and right have little confidence in the trustworthiness of what they hear in our news media. For some their lack of confidence stems from little else than the fact that media personalities on the other side of the ideological divide from themselves present ideas and arguments which lie at variance with their own beliefs.
This is in itself warrant enough for some to consider the personalities unreliable and even dishonest.
For others their lack of confidence stems from the inveterate sloppiness with both facts and reasoning on the part of some in the media that seems at times to border on the intentional.
One of the most common shortcomings among those who serve up opinion on television, radio and print, perhaps, is the failure to be see how their criticisms of those with whom they disagree are often just as applicable to those whom they support. Donald Trump, to give one example, is frequently criticized for his paleolithic attitudes toward women by folks in the media who nevertheless loved Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.
One wonders how those who deplore Trump's boorishness and Trump himself for being boorish reconcile their disdain for the president with the fawning admiration they had for men who were at least as bad and possibly worse. After all, Donald Trump, as far as we know, was never responsible for a girl's death.
While not of the same species as this sort of blindness Stephanie Ruhle at MSNBC offers us a good recent illustration of the intellectual sloppiness and silliness that induce suspicion and contempt among the viewing public.
In one segment in a show last week (see the clip below) she made the startling asseveration that Russia's meddling affected our election.
“What are people on the ground telling you there,” Ruhle asked a correspondent, “and are they mentioning Russia at all? Because,” she continued, “they have a chance to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, but we need to remind our audience of the first thing in the findings — that Russia interfered, foreign interference affected the election and could affect the next one.” (emphasis mine)
Well, where she got this from is unclear but the context of the exchange was the Mueller report, and nothing in Mueller's findings substantiates the claim that "foreign interference affected" the 2016 election. This is more than just a minor faux pas. If the election was affected by foreign actors then the results would be illegitimate and the current president would be politically crippled.
This state of affairs would precipitate a constitutional crisis and would not be at all good for the country.
Then Ruhle follows up with a bit of rhetorical snark: "Are the Republicans capable," she wonders, "of nominating someone who's not a despicable human being who will still do good things for the country?"
Ms. Ruhle is evidently burdened with an attenuated political memory. She forgets 1992 (G.H.W. Bush), 2008 (John McCain), and 2012 (Mitt Romney) - and she forgets that, as Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, the Democrats cast every one of these gentlemen as despicable human beings.
A minority of Republican voters finally decided in the 2016 primaries that if the Democrats are going to treat virtuous Republican candidates as despicable persons they might as well nominate the genuine article, especially since the Democratic candidate herself is a rather strong competitor in the despicability sweepstakes.
Here's the video clip:
As long as folks like Ruhle fail to get their facts straight and fail to see the obvious inconsistencies in their rhetoric they can hardly expect to attract a viewership that consists of anyone other than those already ideologically committed to her point of view and indifferent to the actual truth and reasonableness of what they're hearing.