From: https://shorturl.at/MRRS4 (amac.us)

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Is Legacy Media Finally Ready to Admit Its Honesty Problem?

Posted on Sunday, January 4, 2026
By David P. Deavel

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.
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-- Sean

... "Quick! What's the number for 911?" - Homer Simpson
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